Step up revenue generation efforts – Minister

Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies (MMDAs) must innovate own revenue mobilisation strategies to create wealth to develop their areas.

This would also reduce their dependency on the Central Government for financial assistance.

The Minister of Finance made the call, in a statement read on his behalf, during a Regional Budget Hearing at Yendi, on Monday.

He said many property owners did not pay rates to the assemblies and tasked the MMDAs to do more to address this.

He said the government was also implementing a number of measures to restrict the growth of the wage bill.

Additionally, he said, the Government was also aligning payrolls of MMDAs to their compensation budget to effectively monitor the implementation of that budget.

Mr Terkper said the Ministry had sent templates to the MMDA’s to collect employee compensation data that would feed into the 2016 Compensation Budget and urged all Metropolitan, Municipal, and District Chief Executives to continue to exercise oversight responsibilities on district employees to assist the government to weed out all “ghost names” from pay rolls.

He said the Regional Budget Hearing had become a critical activity in the District Annual Budget Preparation Process, as it provided the Regional Coordinating Councils the opportunity to ensure that MMDA policies were consistent with the National Development Policy Framework.

Alhaji Issah Zakaria, the Yendi Municipal Chief Executive (MCE), called on MMDAs to ensure that all issues contained in their annual budgets for 2016 reflected the true issues and challenges of their districts.