Whenever I see this woman, I remember the lengths she went to protect the former GRA Commissioner from answering legitimate questions of public interest. Today, she’s talking about accountability. SMH
@drgyimah Nobody dey whitewash anybody. We've not forgotten he lost an election as an incumbent and lost the next one. There was a reason. There's a reason why the NPP too was voted out. Get away with this rubbish. Both cases came up during the NPP government. What did they do about them?
Lmao. I don’t know why you people keep comparing the building of mosques to that of the National Cathedral. The Kawukudi Mosque was funded by the Turks, and I’m told the Shiashie Mosque is individually funded as well. If you want to build a cathedral so badly, why not use your own funds? Why does the state have to be the one to fund it? 😂
“We enter a zoo in Yola yesterday and paid 500 Naira per person to view the animals, only to be shocked by these statues” 🗣️
—Family left stunned after visiting a zoo in Yola only to see animal statues instead of live animals.
I wasn’t familiar with Ebi Bright’s game. It’s rare to see a political appointee write so critically and honestly about the office they still hold.
She has written honestly about the constraints assemblies face. The Coordinating Director who runs the assembly is not the assembly’s employee. The finance officer answers to the Controller and Accountant-General. Roads wait on the Ministry. Education and health staff belong to GES and GHS.
It got me thinking. Electing MMDCEs is only a starting point.
We are about to spend a referendum and a whole election cycle on how the political head is chosen, and almost nothing on what that person will be able to do the morning after they win.
It also makes the government’s plan for electing assembly heads sound even more ridiculous. The president nominates five. A vetting committee cuts it to three. The people then vote among the three. We are designing an election where the ballot is filtered before it reaches the voter, for an office that cannot query its own finance officer. It is a longer route to the same appointment, and it leaves every structural problem intact.
The government also rejected several of the CRC’s key recommendations on local government and decentralisation, including the recommendation that central government stop spending a district’s common fund allocation on its behalf. It wants to keep the ability to run programmes like DRIP off the top, and to keep deducting sanitation payments at source to Zoomlion.
And consider what we are electing them to control. For instance, the DACF “guidelines” from the finance ministry direct assemblies to spend 25% of their allocation on 24-hour economy model markets. Every assembly. Whether or not a market is what that district needs most. An assembly drowning in refuse, or watching its shoreline collapse, still commits a quarter of its development money to a nationally chosen project. That is the whole paradox in one line item. The money is transferred to the assembly but the decision is not.
The structures are the thing.
Assemblies should be autonomous. They should prepare their own budgets and execute them. They should make their own resource allocation decisions and answer for them at the ballot box and to the Auditor-General, not to a queue of approvals in Accra.
Central government keeps what only the centre can do. Transfers, on a statutory calendar. Education, health, national security, standards, cross country highways etc.
Assemblies take full control of sanitation, water, inner roads, drains, markets, local planning and enforcement. The things residents actually judge them on.
Until then we will only elect mayors and DCEs but accountability at the local levels won’t change much.
Political looters and their conspirators will do everything they can to delay court processes while they are being prosecuted, only to turn around later and ask, “If the case was so strong, why couldn’t you prosecute it within eight years?” 😂💀
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