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President Evans Atta Mills gathered a renewed momentum for the July 8 congress of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) when he met Metropolitan, Municipality and District Chief Executive (MMDCEs) from the southern sector of the country yesterday at Koforidua in the Eastern region on their annual review conference to take stock of their achievements and what they could do to improve upon the party�s chances of retaining power in 2012. The MMDCEs are seen as useful agents who could play important roles in the re-election bid of the sitting president who is being challenged by Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings, the wife of the founder of the party, for the party�s flagbearership position. The meeting also afforded the president to meet the over 85 MMDCEs from the Eastern, Greater Accra, Volta, Central and Western regions in a closed-door meeting at Capital View Hotel, after the opening ceremony at Mac-Dic Hotel while he was scheduled to meet all the delegates in the Eastern region later in the day. President Atta Mills, who was brimming with a lot of confidence, delivered a powerful extempore speech with renewed vigour at the opening session of the two-day conference, profusely commending his MMDCEs for leading the party�s �Better Ghana Agenda� to help improve the lives of the ordinary Ghanaian. He said he has absolute confidence in his appointees as MMDCEs and will rely on them to help the government achieve its manifesto goals. He entreated his appointees to show greater commitment to their work and prove his critics wrong, saying anybody who says the NDC has not achieved anything significant in its two-and-half years in office must be looking in the wrong direction. He emphasized that social intervention programmes like the capitation grant, the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), National Youth Employment Programme, school feeding programme and free school uniforms remain the pivots around which the NDC government as a social democratic government thrives and therefore appealed to his MMDCEs to attach greater importance to these interventions and ensure that they work effectively. The president stressed on the need for the metropolitan, municipal and district assemblies to find innovative ways to create employment for the teeming unemployed youth in the country. He however expressed disappointment at the way the environment is being polluted and degraded, pointing out that the way waste polythene is being managed in the country leaves much to be desired. The Eastern regional minister, Dr Kwasi Akyem Appea-Kubi and General-Secretary of the National Association of Local Authorities of Ghana (NALAG), Alhaji Ibrahim Mohammed Sherif, in their speeches expressed worry about the high unemployment rate among the youth, especially graduates. �Our major strategy to grow the economy at the local level is to tackle the issue of unemployment in the system. It is a fact that large number of young Ghanaians are desperately looking for jobs which will enable them live decently and take care of their family responsibilities and other obligations,� the regional minister said. He said the problem is more serious with graduates from the universities and the polytechnic, as the economy is not generating enough jobs for them, with most of them ending up on the streets, hawking and doing other menial jobs. The NALAG General Secretary asked the Metropolitan, Municipal, District Assemblies to take the issue of local economic development seriously in their assemblies to enable them to unearth and empower local businesses, through local funding, to generate income and employment for the teeming unemployed youth. The Minister for Local Government and Rural Development, Samuel Ofosu Ampofo, entreated the MMDAs to look at great prospects of revenue mobilization, saying that assemblies are sitting on �goldmines�, especially in the area of property rates, stressing that some of the assemblies are very lazy in generating revenues, which is stifling their operations.