The need for election of Metropolitan, Municipal and District Chief Executives (MMDCEs), by universal adult suffrage has never been so dire, following the rejections, objections, threats and actual destruction of private and public property by some members of the ruling NPP foot soldiers in protest of some of the President’s MMDCEs nominations.
The foot soldiers insist that, they worked hard to bring the party to power and must therefore have a say in who governs at the local authority level which is also the basic unit of development. I strongly disagree with taking the law into their hands, particularly, the destruction of property in protest. But I agree that locals must have a say in who governs them.
Government and party officials embarrassed by the actions of their party men have taken to the idea of election of MMDCEs to stop the recurrence of the protests. As a long standing advocate for election of MMDCEs, I am no longer interested in the promises. I am interested in “when” the recommendation by the Constitution Review Commission (CRC) will be implemented.
I like the President’s diction. For instance, when he says he is in a hurry, I like it. It strikes me as someone who knows what time it is. Because governing a developing country into a developed one must be done with a sense of urgency. And as a salesman, I operate the Pareto Principle, also known as the 80/20 rule. Translated into political governance, the election of MMDCEs, forms part of the 20% actions that the President must take in his first few months in office that would affect 80% of his positive achievements if any.
The partial decentralization system we have operated for the past three decades, which might have served us well in the early years of the (unconstitutional) Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC) era, is now obsolete and detrimental to our current efforts at national development. And that is why I want to see the President in a hurry about election of MMDCEs to stop the mischiefs inherent in the current system.
The first mischief is the palpable fallacy that our decentralisation system should be non-partisan. Well, everyone who cares to know, knows, that political parties – particularly NDC and NPP sponsor majority of candidates to contest for District Assembly elections. How long shall we be in the know of this reality and pretend to be operating something else?
With the benefit of hind sight, one can only construe that the non-partisan attribute incorporated into the decentralisation systems was a fraud perpetrated by the PNDC to discourage and in fact prevent capable citizens of different ideological orientations, from participating in the governance of the country, while they packed their cadres and followers into the assemblies to rubber stamp executive decisions under the pretext of operating a local assembly capable of deliberating on issues to genuinely arrive at decisions.
The fraud is further deepened with the policy of no pay for Assembly members while members sponsored by the party in power, fight for contracts to be able to pay themselves from inflated contract sums. How long shall we pretend this is not happening?
The second mischief is the Unit Committees structure that we spend tax payers’ monies, organising elections to fill when there is in fact no functional unit committees operating as they should, in any part of this country. Again the unit committee members are supposed to be the assembly operatives in the electoral areas. But they are also not supposed to be paid for their work, obviously resulting in the lack of interest and total collapse of the structure.
There is indeed evidence that NDC and NPP functionaries beg their members to just put up their names for elections to the Unit Committees for whatever good measure it might serve their parties in future.
Third mischief is in the Government’s appointment of one third of members of the assemblies. Whereas we have been made to believe that the reason for reserving a third of members of the assembly for the government of the day to determine, is to guarantee that people with technical competence who may not feel motivated to contest in public elections, are included to make their expertise available to the assemblies for development, the realities on the ground prove otherwise.
We all know that the spots reserved for technical people have been taken over by party foot soldiers and the reasons behind the provision have been effectively defeated and negated. How long should we allow this deception to prevail?
The forth mischief: is the Member of Parliament’s (MP’s) Common Fund. That fund is illegal, immoral and unconstitutional. It is a typical example of the Executive bribing members of the legislature to compromise on the operation of checks and balances, besides undermining the need for proper decentralization. The 1992 Constitution is very clear on the District Assembly Common Fund (DACF) – and the purpose for the fund is clear.
How MP’s, whose business is to legislate and check the excesses of the Executive, metamorphosed into economic and development agents at the local level, for which a special purpose vehicle such as the MPs Common Fund was created to finance their activities is the biggest fraud the seems to have gone unnoticed, perhaps at the instigation of the executive to further emasculate the legislature.
When MPs report that they spent their share of the common fund on paying school fees and procuring health insurance policies for their constituents; that should tell us how far we have missed the mark for which reason we must go for aggressive reforms with a sense of urgency. If the DACF is not being disbursed as prescribed by law, how can a perfunctory MPs Common Fund are disbursed accountably for decentralization to benefit the people?
The fifth and biggest mischief: is in the appointment of the MMDCEs by the Executive which has operated to deny the districts, the right human resources, leadership and the development they deserve, besides promoting negative partisanship, greed, corruption and mal administration with impunity.
Contrary to what operates now, lection of MMDCEs will transfer administrative, political and fiscal authority to Districts. Ultimately it will allow for transfer of powers, resources and functions to enable the assemblies to function as autonomous institutions with minimum central government interference.
It will also guarantee that the policy making process will start from the grassroots and their applications subjected to local realities. The democratic deficit will be removed by allowing the people in the district to directly elect their MMDCEs who would become directly accountable to them, besides the added benefits of competition to produce the best mayors, as well as community ownership and involvement in the development process.
If Togo, Benin, Ivory Coast and Senegal just to mention a few unitary states in our sub-region that cannot match up to Ghana’s so-called enviable democratic credentials, are electing their local government leaders, why is Ghana stuck with this system that is not working? I pray the President returns from his 10 nation, Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) tour ready and in a hurry to have MMDCEs elected.
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