Mahama charges MMDCEs to strengthen local economies


President John Mahama has directed the local government ministry to review the Functional Organizational Assessment (FOA)  of MMDCES to better assess the performance of the district and metropolitan heads.

Addressing the MMDCEs, the president said although some districts are performing well, others are not living up to expectation.

The Conference was held at the Institute of Management and Public Administration, GIMPA.

The MMDCE conference is the second of its kind. The previous one held last year was used to spell out government expectations of appointees.

This year’s was to take stock and assess the extent of work by the local assemblies.

Senior presidential advisor Paul Victor Obeng admonished  the DCEs to worker harder in order to improve the welfare of the citizens.

“We have barely two years to demonstrate to the people who are watching how much welfare we have brought to them. We don’t have three years; we have up to end of December 2015 because 2016 is an election year, everybody goes blind technically. They don’t see new things, genuine things that are done are seen to be political gimmicks…everybody here is going to be measured . Your performance will be measured by what you have accomplished,” Mr Obeng reminded.

 The Local government minister Akwasi Oppong Fosu also advised them to be composed even when provoked in the media.

” leadership enjoins us to have a sense of purpose, passion and responsibility. We need to maintain our composure at all times even in the face of extreme provocation in a way that we don’t bring the image of the NDc, the president and the government into disrepute”

Touching on some development projects at the local level including education, health care delivery and social interventions, President John Mahama entreated them to create workable strategies depending on their peculiar cases.

He also urged them to strengthen their local economies which would eventually feed into the national economy

“Under our manifesto we pledge to provide decent and sustainable jobs for our people…I must state however that job creation is inevitably a local effort and that is why our decentralization efforts are shifting emphasis to the Local Economic Development LED programmes,” he said

He said a restructured GYEEDA soon to be laid in Parliament will be decentralized to ensure supervision, transparency and accountability.

The president also spoke about increasing internally generated funds without necessarily over taxing the populace.

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