Often times people are told by government officials that there are limited financial resources to finance different
development projects/programmes and to provide assistance for self help. This view is also held by the academic
world. This is usually taken as an absolute truth and usually as an excuse for the limited socio-economic
development of the citizens and societies. While this may be true, we propose a problematisation of this by
gathering and making sense of evidence from the annual audit reports for the Local Government Authorities
(LGAs) in Tanzania. The central aim of the proposed paper therefore is to show the fallacy of “the limited
resources” by arguing that it is not a matter of limited resources but whether and how the available resources are
put to intended use for development and poverty reduction goals. The relevance of this is to shift focus on
development resources available to whether and how the extent to which the resources are put to use and to
establish whether LGAs are keeping people into poverty by using or not using the available resources.