CREATION OF NEW REGIONS IS PUTTING PLASTER ON A DIRTY WOUND

I am amazed at how a flight of thought on a political platform suddenly metamorphosed into a policy decision in Ghana without it being subjected to any policy analysis, while those who knows better sits in silence (Make us cherish fearless honesty). One such policy is the reorganisation of regions promised by the two major political parties during the 2016 electioneering campaigns. The NPP promised to split the western region into two ostensibly because some chiefs complained that it takes them 7-8 hours to travel to the regional capital Secondi. Not to be outdone the NDC promised to create 5 additional regions. The NPP won the election and have started putting in place measures to create those additional region(s). This is a good approach if the solution to the problem were to be well thought out, which in this case is not. The reason why it takes 7-8 hours to travel to the regional capital is not a fact of distance it is a matter of very bad roads and the western region have so many of such roads. The northern region with equally bad roads is the largest region in terms of land area but with good roads one could traverse the region from Bole to Bunkpurugu in five hours or less. Now let me explain why the creation of additional regions is a bad idea which the policy analysis process would have weeded out had it been subjected to it. 1. The decentralization process that we are implementing in Ghana today does not see the region as a fulcrum of development, the region is seen as a way of de-concentration of the national Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs), you can call them outpost or annexes of the national MDAs. It has no policy making power, it is setup to coordinate and harmonize district level policy for the various national level MDAs. 2. The district level is the real fulcrum of development, it is the level of devolution, where decentralization in its true sense of the concept is played out. Section 4 (1) of the Local Government Act, 1993, Act 462, provides that “Each District Assembly shall be a body corporate with perpetual succession and a common seal and may sue and be sued in its own name”. Section 4 (2) states that: “A District Assembly shall have power for the discharge of any of its functions to acquire and hold movable or immovable property, to dispose of such property and to enter into any contract or other transaction”. The District Assembly (DA) is the policy making body with legislative and taxation powers. The DA has its power derived from Article 241 (3) of the Constitution which states that: “Subject to this Constitution, a District Assembly shall be the highest political authority in the district, and shall have deliberative, legislative and executive powers”. The regions have no such powers. 3. The law also made provision for the creation of the District Assemblies Common Fund (DACF), which we can call the national cake, this cake is distributed among districts not among regions. So if anybody wants to ensure that a particular area gets more of the national cake, he should be thinking of getting them more districts not regions which does not bring any cake home. 4. The creation of a region is not as straight forward as creating a district, it might have to go through difficult and expensive processes such as a referendum, only to create an entity that adds no real value to the lives of the people, except further deepening of the tribal and ethnic divide 5. Had it been established that the people working at the Regional Coordinating Councils (RCCs) are overwhelmed with their work load, we might consider additional regions, even with that we could expand the existing RCCs. The creation of additional region(s) looks to me like putting plaster on a dirty wound, it does not bring any healing (Development) to the injured (Electorates), it could actually mask the real problem from a good solution. In this country if an institution is not efficient we don’t find out why, we only add to it only for the new creation to suffer the same bottle necks. My view is that let’s subject the creation of new regions to simple cost effectiveness and efficiency analysis and made same public before embarking on this project. Parliament as it is currently constituted might not be able to block the appointment of the designated minister because both sides made the promise to increase the number of regions.