The 10-member team tasked to go round the country to interview candidates for the position of Chief executives of metropolitan, municipal and district assemblies (MMDAs) has short-listed three persons for each assembly and presented the names to President J.E.A Mills. The Presidency is currently undertaking background and other checks on the individual aspirants to select one of them for them for each MMDA and present the names to the various assemblies for confirmation, as required by law. The Minister of local Government and Rural Development, Mr. Joseph Yieleh Chireh, who disclosed this to the Daily Graphic, said it was the expectation that the appointees would be at post by the end of this month. When the Mills administration took office, it asked all chief executives who were appointed during the Kufuor administration to stay at post until further notice. However, on February 19, 2009, the President revoked their appointments. A statement issued by Mr. Chireh asked them to hand over properly to the metropolitan, municipal and district co-coordinating directors, while regional ministers were mandated to have oversight responsibility of the assemblies in their regions until substantive chief executive were put in place. Considering the aspirants, the minister said it was automatic that all cases any of the three short-listed would be selected, since there was the possibility that all the three would not meet the presidential benchmark. He said the selection team consulted other stakeholders to arrive at qualified persons to arrive at qualified persons with integrity to head the assemblies to accelerate their development process. Mr. Chireh noted with concern how some stakeholders were taking the term ‘consultation’ to mean that their choice of candidate should appreciate that other considerations, including background checks and competence, played a part in the selection process. He expressed worry at the increasing rate at which huge sums of money that should be collected by the assemblies as their revenue were siphoned by unscrupulous officials through dubious means. He said the modus operandi of such assembly revenue officials was that they printed their own revenue receipts, connived with collectors and duped the assemblies of huge sums of revenue that could have been used for development. Mr. Chireh noted that another reason the assemblies were not able to generate enough revenue was the refusal of the people to pay their taxes because they hardly saw the immediate benefit of the taxes they paid. He said to forestall all these problems, which included bad accounting practices and lack of proper identification of property and other business concerns within the jurisdiction of the assemblies, the government was speeding up the computerization of the work of the assemblies to make them efficient and effective. Source: Daily Graphic