Flagbearer for the National Democratic Congress Party and former President John Dramani Mahama has promised to increase the District Assemblies Common Fund from the current 5% to 7% if he wins the 2024 elections.
According to the presidential candidate for the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), resourcing the district assemblies sufficiently would make governance at the local level more effective and impactful.
Citinewsroom.com reports him as making the promise in Bole, his hometown after casting his vote in the district assembly elections on Tuesday, December 19, 2023.
“If God smiles on us, and we win the 2024 elections, we are going to take decentralization seriously, the rest of the ministries seriously, and the rest of the MMDAs that are still centralized. We are going to make sure that District Common Fund disbursement increases from 5% to 7%, as enforced in 2016, and that the District Assemblies Common Fund is going to be regular so that districts can take advantage of it to increase the pace of their development,” the news website quotes Mahama as having said.
“We are going to complete the decentralization so that we truly hand over power to the people at the local government level. Until we get our decentralization right, Ghana is not going to go anywhere, and so we are going to take it seriously,” he acknowledged.
Commenting on some of the challenges that characterized the district assembly elections in certain parts of the country, Mahama entreated the Electoral Commission of Ghana to initiate measures to forestall their recurrence in the 2024 general elections. According to him, the stakes in next year’s elections are high, so challenges such as malfunctioning equipment and delayed starts of the voting process that were encountered in the local-level elections must be guarded against.
