Oguaa assembly makes strides in revenue mobilization

Cape Coast, Oct 31, GNA - The Cape Coast Municipal Assembly internally generated 2.3 billion cedis between January and September, a little above the 2.2 billion cedis it targeted to raise. The assembly's recurrent expenditure has also been within its budget and stands at 2.2 billion cedis, against a budgeted figure of 2.9 billion cedis.

It received a total of 3.4 billion cedis for the first and second quarters from the district assemblies' common fund. Ms Mercy Arhin, the Municipal Chief Executive, said this at the second ordinary meeting of the assembly at Cape Coast on Tuesday. She attributed the increase in revenue to the imposition of more realistic rates, especially property rates, involvement of private revenue collectors, strengthening of supervision and monitoring as well as setting of realistic targets for revenue collectors. Touching on projects, she said apart from support from the HIPC fund, GETFund and common fund, the assembly was also benefiting from the "schools under trees programme" of which six schools are to be provided with new classroom blocks.

She said Kwegyir Aggrey, Ghana National College and St Monica's Girls Basic Schools would be provided with six-unit classroom block each while the Ekon M/A Mensah Sarbah and Cape Coast Presbyterian schools would each have a three-unit classroom block. Ms Arhin expressed concern about the delay in the release of funds to pay contractors for completed projects from the HIPC funds and appealed to the assembly's budget committee to make allocations for both completed and on-going projects. She appealed to contractors executing such projects to do a good job or face sanctions including black listing by the assembly. Ms Arhin said the assembly would begin naming of streets and numbering of houses in the municipality from the middle of next month. She said a committee would be set up to liase with the consultant to manage the project and appealed to the assembly members to make inputs to ensure that it is successfully implemented. Ms Arhin said the assembly took delivery of 200,000 energy saving bulbs and had distributed 150,000 pieces to households. It also sourced 300 million cedis to rehabilitate some streets lights in the central business sector of the municipality.

Mr Godwin Edwin Buckman, presiding member, commended President John Agyekum Kufuor for elevating the municipality to a metropolis and gave the assurance that the assembly would do what is expected of it in its new status.

He appealed to the members to change their attitude particularly to time, act as good team players and forge ahead with the development of the area. 31 Oct 07