District directors’ position to be advertised
The position of district, municipal and metropolitan coordinating directors is to be advertised for all qualified persons to apply, beginning next year.
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The current practice where only staff of the administrative class ascends to the position will now be opened up to all qualified departmental heads within and outside the assemblies to compete for.
At the moment, most of the MMDAs in the country have no qualified directors. Only 92 out of the 216 MMDAs have substantive coordinating directors. The rest of the directors are in acting capacities.
The Head of the Local Government Service, Dr Callistus Mahama, who was speaking at a workshop of district directors of agriculture in Tamale on Monday, said the new measures, as contained in the Legislative Instrument 1961, also mandated the integration of district directorate of agriculture into the various assemblies.
As a result, he indicated that, “district directors of agriculture are no more under the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MoFA) but now part of the assembly system.”
“We would, therefore, no longer tolerate the situation where coordinating directors hand over administrative duties to their assistants in their absence irrespective of their qualifications. In such a situation, the director should hand over to the next senior person in the assembly irrespective of his department,” Dr Mahama stated.
According to him, there were 11, 13 and 16 departments under the district, municipal and metropolitan assemblies respectively.
Dr Mahama, therefore, explained that the workshop was fashioned out to empower the participants on the workings of the local government system to offer the opportunity for them to give off their best when the need arose.
He added that his outfit would soon come out with a road map to fast track the institutional frame work to deepen the decentralisation process and make it work.
Among the topics the participants were taken through were local government level leadership; concept, principles and practice, human resource management and development at the local government service and project and programme management, monitoring and evaluation.
In a speech read on his behalf, the Northern Region Coordinating Director, Alhaji Alhassan Issahaku, charged the participants to attach much importance to what they had learnt, since it would help them appreciate work at their respective assemblies.