LOCAL GOVERNANCE IMPEDE DEV'T - OMANHENE

Posted on: www.dailyguideghana.com

By William Yaw Owusu

Friday, November 29, 2013

Nana Kobena Nketsiah V, Omanhene of Essikadu Traditional Area, says the current local governance system is an impediment to accelerated development, especially in the rural areas.

“The local governance system has been our major problem. The top-down approach has not helped us in anyway and unless we turn around and adopt the bottom-up approach, we will never get anywhere.”

Nana Nketsiah V disclosed this at a National Policy Dialogue on District Assembly Common Fund, Local Revenue and Investment in Agriculture in Accra yesterday.

It was organized by the Social Enterprise Foundation aka SEND West Africa under the theme: “Partnering government to ensure effective and efficient management of public resources for poverty reduction.”

The event attracted MPs, DCEs and a host of local governance experts.

SEND West Africa said it had conducted research into how the District Assembly Common Fund, Local Revenue and Investment in Agriculture were being harnessed.

It said its findings suggested that all the three areas were not being managed properly to alleviate poverty.

On the effective utilization of the District Assembly Common Fund, SEND West Africa recommended, among other things, that re-centralization tendencies should be discouraged and tasked the assemblies to develop innovative ways of generating revenue.

It also recommended that budgetary allocation to agriculture should match the formulation of policy options, which favour a greater section of the population.

Nana Nketsiah V, who chaired the occasion, said the current local governance structure did not make enough room for consensus building and collective decision-making, adding “we need real participatory democracy.”

“We are now paying for our failure to empower our communities to effectively manage their own resources.

“We live in a country where every village looks up to the centre in Accra to come and develop their communities. We have to put our local governance right.”

Emmanuel Kwadwo Agyekum, a Deputy Minister of Local Government and Rural Development, said some of SEND’s findings may not be entirely correct.

He refuted claims that statutory deductions were made to the assemblies’ funds without their consent.

He said when he was MCE for Nkoranza South, he never allowed any deductions without his consent.

While some of the participants agreed with the Deputy Minister, others were of the view that statutory deductions had been done without any requests to the central government from the assemblies.

Vitus Azeem, Executive Secretary of the Ghana Integrity Initiative, who moderated the dialogue, said “no matter what good policies you have, if you do not have transparency and accountability you would not make any headway in governance.”

He urged the DCEs to speak up when their common funds are being deducted for programmes they did not request for.

Saipha Kamara, CEO of SEND West Africa, said they repeated the recommendations because they wanted to ascertain the extent to which they were being implemented.

He commended the government and other state agencies for their partnership and said SEND was committed to helping to implement pro-poor policies for poverty alleviation.