General News of Saturday, 2 July 2016
Source: citifmonline.com
Northern Regional Minister, Abdallah Abubakari
The Northern Regional Minister, Abdallah Abubakari, has expressed displeasure at some Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies (MMDAs) for “sleeping on the job” thereby failing to meet their revenue targets.
The Minister, who was commenting on the performance of MMDAs in the region in terms of revenue generation, said, “Though some assemblies have done fairly well in this direction and they need to be commended, many others perform to expectation”.
Mr. Abubakari was speaking at the first meeting of the Northern Regional Coordinating Council (NRCC) in Tamale, to assess the NRCC’s monitoring and coordinating roles in devising strategies for the future.
For the 2016 financial year, the 26 MMDAs in the region are expected to collect a total of GHc15,583,243.00 as internally generated funds (IGF).
Mr. Abubakari said as, at the end of the first quarter of the year, all the MMDAs managed to collect only GHc2, 257,343.00, representing 14.49 per cent of the estimated amount to be collected within the year.
He, therefore, urged metropolitan, municipal and district chief executives of the MMDAs that were not doing well, to come out with strategies to enhance their IGFs.
Mr. Abubakari appealed to MMDAs to speed up work on mandatory projects contained in their annual action plans for this year, to enhance their service delivery in the areas of health and education.
Touching on peace and security in the region, he called on the metropolitan, municipal and district chief executives and district security committees, to take more pro-active measures to reduce conflicts before they got out of control.
Mr. Abubakari called for peace in this year’s elections adding that“security agencies in the region must put their intelligence mechanisms to work to track would-be trouble makers down so that we come out from the elections more united as a people”.