Local Government

GEIC Plans For New Look In Local Government

Mr. A. B. Sutton, who has been appointed to the newly created post of Local Govern ment Training Officer in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony, arrived in Tarawa in early April to take up his post.

MR. SUTTON’S main task will be to organise and run a Local Government Training School which will be set up at Betio, Tarawa, to train Island Executive Officers, who are to be the key figures in the planned reorganisation of local government in the GEIC.

Island Executive Officers will be clerks to the Island Councils and clerks of the new Island Courts that are to be established at the same time as the new councils. The officers will have a general executive respon sibility for the implementation of the decisions of the councils.

Candidates chosen for training at the school are to have a six-month course under the supervision of Mr.

Sutton, and will then be posted to their jobs in the islands.

Mr. Sutton will spend the period after the end of the first course, which will be attended by 15 candidates, in travelling to the islands with the newly-appointed officers, establishing them in their jobs and supervising the first stages of the new system.

85 Applications

An intensive publicity campaign resulted in 85 applications for the 15 vacancies on the first course, and only four islands are not represented.

An encouraging feature of the response was the fact that of the 85 applicants, fewer than 30 are in jobs at the moment (nearly all in the present island councils or the central government), which indicates that there is in the islands a con siderable reserve of talent that has yet to be used.

The school was scheduled to open in early May.

Mr. Sutton, who is 47, has had long experience of local government, in Britain, where he spent 18 years on various rural district councils, and in Tanganyika, where he was Senior Local Government Officer from 1952-1964.