Local, foreign unions must collaborate

The General Secretary of the Local Government Workers’ Union (LGWU), Mr Kenneth Daniels, has urged unions in the country to form partnerships and collaborate with foreign unions to enable them to share and learn best practices for their betterment.

Such partnership and collaboration, he said, should be strengthened and built upon for the growth and development of the unions.

Mr Daniels was speaking at the opening of a four-day international workshop organised by the Osun State Chapter of the Nigerian Union of Local Government Employees (NULGE) at the Institute of Local Government Studies at Madina, a suburb of Accra.

Participants

The workshop is being organised in collaboration with the LGWU of TUC, Ghana.

About 700 delegates from the NULGE are participating in the event, which is on the theme: “Role of Local Government Workers in the Development of the State of Osun; Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow.”

Mr Daniels indicated that the relationship between the LGWU of TUC and their Nigerian counterpart dated 20 years ago.

“Once every year our colleagues from Nigeria would come to Ghana to hold an international workshop. We host and organise some of the resource persons and experts for them to come and learn from the Ghanaian way of local governance,” he stated.

Focus

Mr Daniels indicated that the focus of this year’s workshop was the study of the local governance system between the two countries, especially in the area of service delivery standards that were supposed to guide the services offered to the public.

He noted that the 700 participants from the NULGE were quite significant since in the past the number that came for similar programmes was between 200 and 300.

Earlier in a presentation, he mentioned six service delivery standards in local governance as participation, professionalism, clients focus, transparency, efficient and effective use of resources, as well as accountability.

Change

A Management Consultant, Mr Samuel Hoffman, urged local authorities to go beyond their traditional functions of waste management and sanitation, provision of municipal services and basic infrastructure, as well as the collection of tolls and levies.

“They are required to be agents of developments and change in a productive way,” he said, adding that the way forward for local governments and administrative systems required assemblies to be forward looking.

Objectives

The President of the Osun State Chapter of NULGE, Comrade (Engr.) Jacob Adedeji Adeyeye, said the objectives of the workshop were to ensure confidence and build team spirit in order to look beyond the present administration and ensure continuity in development.

Moreover, the event, according to him, was to create the needed avenues that would ensure mutual understanding and peaceful coexistence between workers and political functionaries in all the local government councils.

“The workshop is packaged to afford the participants opportunity to familiarise themselves with the operations of local government administration in Ghana as compared to Nigeria,” he said.