‘MMDCEs, directors will be sanctioned if ...’

The Greater Accra Regional Minister, Mr Ishmael Ashitey, has stressed that metropolitan, municipal and district chief executives (MMDCEs) and their co-ordinating directors who fail to meet key performance indicators for the development of their regions will be sanctioned.

The indicators include strengthening the decentralisation system of governance, deepening democratic participation, providing leadership and policy direction for poverty alleviation and wealth creation and ensuring proper waste management.

“It is about time we started sanctioning officials who are not working,” he said, adding that President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo’s vision was to make Accra the cleanest city in Africa, “but we are not working towards the achievement of that vision. Accra has even become dirtier than it used to be”.

Regional co-ordinating council meeting

Mr Ashitey was speaking at the opening of a two-day Greater Accra Regional Co-ordinating Council meeting in Accra for 120 key functionaries at the regional and the district levels.

The participants included the Deputy Regional Minister, Mrs Elizabeth Sackey; MMDCEs, co-ordinating directors, presiding members, heads of departments and units and representatives of the Regional House of Chiefs.

They will interact and share ideas on various innovative solutions they have to adopt to accelerate development.

Mr Ashitey said the council was working, in collaboration with the Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development, to administer sanctions to ensure that persons who were given responsibilities in the various metropolitan, municipal and district assemblies (MMDAs) in the region stepped up their game.

Coordinating

Some of the MMDCEs and co-ordinating directors were under-performing because, in his view, they did not have a better understanding of the system the government was operating and “so they are not finding efficient solutions to problems in their respective districts”.

He advised the MMDCEs to work together as a team by coordinating their efforts towards developing a comprehensive development agenda consistent with the national vision.

The minister mentioned some of the development challenges of the region as loopholes in revenue generation, infrastructural deficits, boundary disputes, street hawking, frequent armed robbery cases, fraud, car snatching and security challenges.

Others were poor waste and environmental management, annual cholera outbreaks, chieftaincy and land disputes, the use of land guards, the springing up of slums, inadequate office and residential accommodation, lack of disaster prevention management and poor road and educational infrastructure, he added.

“To resolve the issue of the pockets of chieftaincy and land disputes which have, in some instances, resulted in clashes and loss of lives and properties and which threaten the development of the region, we need to establish conflict resolution management committees in the various MMDAs,” he said.

Waste management

During the interaction session, the Metropolitan Chief Director of the Accra Metropolitan Assembly (AMA), Mr Sam Ayeh-Datey, expressed concern over the waste management challenges faced by the assembly.

He said currently, 11 landfill sites in the region had been closed, a development that had put pressure on the only functional landfill at Kpone, leading to the queuing of trucks of the various service providers.

“Now that we are in the rainy season, the situation is even worse,” he said, and called for an immediate solution to the problem.

The MCE for Kpone Katamanso, Mr Solomon Appiah, said the Kpone landfill site would experience a slide soon if the necessary measures were not put in place.

“Danger is looming. We may have a similar incident like what happened in Ethiopia soon,” he said.