An anti-corruption campaigner, Sydney Casely-Hayford, wants government to dissolve the Secretariat solely charged with the responsibility to disburse the District Assembly Common Fund, saying it is a waste of resources.
According to him, the fund, together with its managers, only slow down development, and cost the country additional money that could be used for other projects.
Speaking on The Big Issue on Citi FM on Saturday, Mr. Casely-Hayford said it would be prudent for government to employ an electronic system that will enable the transfer of fund directly to the various assemblies rather than distributing it through a central resource pool.
He noted, “you have built a district assembly common fund and administrator and you are spending money on him and a whole lot of staff and all that their job is, is to allocate money to districts. These are the fruitless things that we do and we say that because the money has gone to the district assembly common fund, its done and the districts have got money.”
According to him, an effective approach to allocating resources to the various districts for development was to “scrap the District Assembly Common Fund Secretariat (DACF), and allocate resources [directly] to the districts.”
“You are deciding that you are allocating resources to the districts and you are deciding that you are going to take 5% of all the revenues and it is going to the districts. You don’t need anybody to manage it [independently], it can be managed by the ministry of finance or the ministry of local government. It is just a bank transfer”, he said.
‘Government to increase common fund’
The National Democratic Congress (NDC) government in the highlights of its recently launched manifesto, stated THAT it would increase the common fund allocation for districts to be reserved for the disabled.
A Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Democratic Governance (IDEG), Dr. Kwesi Jonah, recently called for an increase in the district assembly common fund from 7.5 percent of tax revenue to 15 per cent.
According to him, this would help promote faster development of the local communities.
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