The former Executive Vice President of Unilever Ghana and Nigeria, Yaw Nsarkoh, has raised concerns about the leadership structure in the country.

According to him, the quality of a country's leadership structure directly influences its outcomes and results.

Speaking to JoyNews about ‘Leadership in Ghana’ on February 16, he explained that the country is unable to attain the level of development it wants because of weak fundamentals of the leadership hierarchy.

As such, he said, each time the leaders are mentioned, people immediately think of the President and the Vice President.

He said this has created a disconnect between the elite and local government.

“It is not only about the leaders. We talk a lot about the leaders and when you are talking about leaders I assume you are talking about the people who are standing for President, or Vice President. So, that is all that our democracy has become about.

“There is, for example, a considerable disengagement between the elite and local government in the country. The final mile, as we like to say, the last mile of delivery, the capillary of governance, is in local government.

“If I come into the studio now and I go round and I ask the people who are there to tell me who your district assembly member is and when was the last time that you spoke to him or you attended a district assembly meeting, I suspect that the room will go quiet. There is a reason why the room will go quiet, the bourgeois, the elite have disengaged from local government,” he said.

He argued that the local government was the first point of development, therefore if the electorates are unable to hold executives at that level accountable for their actions, this phenomenon is replicated at the apex level. 

“Now if you do not have a local government like the other that can be held accountable, that is competent, you show me the country that has been able to deliver prosperity and development without functioning local government. We have to start from there,”