Dr Nana Ato Arthur, the Head of Local Government Service, has urged metropolitan, municipal and district chief executives (MMDCEs) to prioritise training of their respective staff.
He said staff training and capacity building would lead to increase in productivity of the various MMDAs.
Dr Nana Ato Arthur made the appeal in his presentation at the just ended 70th Annual New Year School and Conference at the University of Ghana, Legon.
He said due to inadequate funds, most MMDCEs were not interested in training their staff.
Another reason was the less priority given to staff training by political parties in their electioneering, he said.
“If you don’t train your staff, how are you expecting them to deliver? But I want to argue that training of your staff is as important as building a school.”
Dr Ato Arthur also cited the lack of public access to information at the MMDAs as one of the challenges facing decentralisation in Ghana.
“How many assemblies today would you go to and there is a billboard stating: These are the number of projects we are doing this year. And this project cost this much?” he asked.
“And these are the contractors that were awarded the contracts. The project begins in May 2019, and is expected to end January 2020. How many assemblies will you find these?”
“We don’t even want people to know who the contractors are. We don’t even want the public to know the contract sums.”
With regards to finance, Nana Ato Arthur said the financial resource at the assemblies were inadequate; whether from the internally generated fund or from the District Assembly Common Fund, it was still inadequate, judging from the number of large projects that MMDAs had to undertake.
He said another challenge facing the MMDAs was the apparent lack of appetite for decentralisation in Ghana.
Within 30 years of Ghana’s decentralisation, the nation had witnessed modest gains, he said, citing “the unfinished business of decentralisation” as a challenge.
The 70th Annual New Year School and Conference was on the theme: “Building Strong Institutions for Democratic Consolidation in Ghana”.
It was organised by the School of Continuing and Distance Education of the College of Education, University of Ghana, in collaboration with the Ministry of Local Government and Rural Develop
