“You, therefore, need not worry yourselves,” he told metropolitan, municipal and district chief executives (MMDCEs) from the northern zone at the opening of their 2011 conference in Kumasi.
Instead, President Mills called on the rank and file of the NDC to avoid acts that would mar the beauty of the congress and threaten the future of the party.
“We belong to one party and the greatest task is ahead of us in 2012 and so all must be patient,” he said.
The theme for the three-day conference is, “Implementing the Better Ghana Agenda through sustainable economic development”.
President Mills recounted some of the achievements that his government had chalked up within the relatively short period of two-and-a-half years and called on the people to expect a lot more from the government in the remaining one-and-a-half years.
“And at the end of the four years, Ghanaians will themselves appeal to us to stay in power,” he said.
In all that, he noted, the MMDCEs had a central role to play and said from his rounds, he had realised that they had done tremendously well by spearheading aggressive development in the communities.
He, however, charged them not to be complacent with the successes achieved but work even harder than before to further improve the lives of the people.
“After all, governance is about service to the people,” he said, and admonished them not to lord it over the people.
Touching on local revenue generation, the President stressed the need for the assemblies to explore other potential area to complement inflows from the central government, citing property tax as one potential area.
“I’m not saying that people should be targeted for taxation, but there should be equitable tax distribution,” he stressed.
Expressing delight that the theme for the conference centred on local economic development, he indicated that unless the people at the grass roots were empowered to come up and build a strong and resilient economy, “we cannot claim to have justified the confidence the people reposed in us”.
President Mills said his was a government grounded on social democratic principles and so it would keep to improving programmes such as the school feeding, the capitation grant and free uniforms and exercise books for schoolchildren.
The Minister of Local Government and Rural Development, Mr Samuel Ofosu-Ampofo, lauded President Mills’s commitment to the “Better Ghana” agenda.
He noted the positive results of the decentralisation programme and said to further deepen the process, a number of interventions had taken place under the current government.
They included the migration of almost 30,000 personnel from the Civil Service to the Local Government Service and the strengthening of structures below the MMDAs, capacity-building programmes for assembly members, among others.
Mr Ofosu-Ampofo reminded the MMDCEs that their performances were being closely monitored by the ordinary Ghanaian and they must, therefore, demonstrate that they were put in the seats to serve.
The Ashanti Regional Minister, Dr Kwaku Agyeman Mensah, in his welcoming address, said the conference was necessary because, among other things, it would properly position the MMDCEs with the right information and ideas to help them offer the needed inspirational leadership in their respective communities.
He mentioned the numerous development projects that the government had undertaken in the region and said the people would forever be grateful to President Mills and the government.
The Akyempimhene of Kumasi, Oheneba Adusei Poku, who chaired the opening ceremony, called for support for President Mills in his quest to lead the country to prosperity.
Read this article: