The co-founder of the Ghana Center for Democratic Development (CDD-Ghana), Prof Baffour Agyemang-Duah, has called for a more decentralised approach to Ghana's development plan.

This comes after the National Development Planning Commission (NDPC) unveiled a new 40-year development plan.

Speaking on JoyNews’ PM Express, he acknowledged that while Ghana has made progress in administrative decentralization, the country has failed in fiscal and political decentralization, which has been one of the main drawbacks in the development process.

Prof Agyeman-Duah said, “When you have a country like Ghana, we say we are democratic and therefore people should be at the centre of our development.

"But then at the same time, you hear something that sounds like a command economy plan, a centralised economy, because everything seems to be built around the central government. There's a contradiction there.”

“We should be looking at how we decentralize our development processes. So while I appreciate the fact that we should have a development planning for the nation, we should also be seriously considering having a decentralized political system that will enable development in the country to be driven more at the community or the district level.”

Prof. Agyemang-Duah admitted that at the national level, there must be a broad framework to ensure successive governments have a sense of where the country is headed over the next 30 years or so.

However, “that is different from getting the districts to identify their needs, their priorities, and working at that level with the support from central government for it to be driven at the district level. I'm saying this in the context of decentralisation, which the constitution provides, which no government has seriously pursued,” he told the host Evans Mensah.

Meanwhile, the Director-General of the National Development Planning Commission (NDPC), Dr Kodjo Esseim Mensah–Abrampa said the development plan brings to fruition the vision of the country.

Also speaking on JoyNews’ PM Express, he explained that through broad discussions with various stakeholders, the NDPC was able to define certain goals, vision, aspirations and directions the country needs to undertake to ensure developmental growth in the next four decades.