Thursday, 19 October 2017

Creating Yet More Regions In Ghana Does Not Make Sense - Let Us Elect Local Leaders Instead

It is typical of our nation's political class that exactly a day after the president inaugurated a bleeding-edge, digitised national addressing  system, our country  is then made to take ten steps backwards.

What is the point  of  creating  more  regions in Ghana - and add yet more bureaucratic inertia to a notoriously corrupt  and creaking system that stifles private initiative and burdens hapless taxpayers: who will be called upon to shoulder the overly-generous compensation packages of even more government ministers and upper-echelon officials  of our  profligate public-sector who advise them? Ebeeii.

What is needed, if we are to successfully transform our  nation into a prosperous society, is dynamism at the grassroots level - driven by competitive district-level elections to select local government leaders democratically. Haaba.

That is how best  to ensure that  meeting the  needs of grassroots people underpins governance at that level - through free and fair elections in which political parties compete for the election of their candidates to be metropolitan, municipal and district chief executives.

Ditto get political parties to  compete to elect assembly members - who will work in oversight committees to monitor elected chief executives'  performance  and sanction them whenever necessary: thus ensuring accountability and transparency during their tenures in office.

With respect, just who are we fooling with this nonsense about creating more regions being such a good idea,  I ask? The question is: Is the best way of  meeting  the needs of Ghanaians at the grassroots-level, democratically, not simply to empower them to directly  elect metropolitan, municipal and district chief executives? Ditto members of Netropolitan, Municipal and  District Assemblies? Hmm, Oman Ghana - eyeasem o: asem kesie  ebeba debi ankasa.

It is such a pity that rather than  working towards that end, the president has rather gone ahead to  inaugurate a committee of the great and good in Ghanaian society - to take public soundings on a foolish and retrogressive idea that is wasteful of taxpayers' money: and cloaks a hidden ethnocentric  agenda of the diehard tribal-supremacists in Ghana's political world.

The plain truth is that we don't need yet more regions to bring development to people at the grassroots-level. What we need is to elect metropolitan, municipal and district chief executives democratically. Period.

Creating yet  more regions in Ghana does not make sense. It is pandering to ethnocentrism in our country. Let us elect local leaders to run metropolitan, municipal and district chief executives instead. Full stop. Haaba.

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