Dr. benjamin Kunbuor is the Health Minister and a legal practitioner in Ghana
By William Yaw Owusu
Friday March 26, 2010
A BOOK titled “Law and Decentralised Development in Northern Ghana” which seeks to offer some solutions to current problems in the country’s decentralisation process has been launched in Accra.
The book which comes in a beautiful green hardcover was written by the Health Minister, Dr. Benjamin Kunbuor who is also a legal practitioner.
Dr. Kwamena Ahwoi a principal lecturer at GIMPA and an NDC stalwart who reviewed the book during the launch described Dr. Kunbuor’s efforts as “a necessary intervention in our attempts to strengthen our decentralisation process.”
He said “there are very important findings in this book. It provides novel insight into the discourse of democratic decentralisation and its linkages with local development.”
Dr. Ahwoi, a local governance expert himself said the book “provokes a re-examination of the fundamentals of the country’s decentralisation programme and indeed questions whether the authors of the programme led by myself got the fundamentals right to begin with.”
Dr. Ahwoi noted that Dr. Kunbuor had been able to discover that “far from local development being the objective of Ghana’s decentralisation programme, it is in reality a spatial strategy of the state to produce material spaces, appropriate and dominate them as a way out of the crisis of its political economy.”
“He was also able to discover that state legislation on land creates parallel institutions to those of traditional land administration structures, precipitating some of the conflicts in land administration in Ghana.”
Dr Ahwoi further said the Health Minister had found that “the lack of attention by the Ghanaian state to the land question in northern Ghana lies in the policy of previously vesting lands in the state, leading to a situation in which land conflict between the state and local communities were always resolved in favour of the state.”
Another significant revelation by the author was “the absence of the land question in the development discourse of decentralisation programmes of Ghana over the years which confirms that those programmes have failed to appreciate traditional forms of decentralised political formations,” he added.
In Dr. Ahwoi’s estimation, the book had ably described how the country’s decentralisation programme had marginalized the issue of land administration, the exercise of state power in land administration as well as the bottom-up approach to development which had failed to address development concerns pertinent to local communities.
Dr. Kunbuor in his introductory remarks said he focused on decentralisation of the northern regions because of the peculiar nature of development in the area adding “this book has policy ramifications"
Also see : www.dailyguideghana.com
No comments:
Post a Comment