The Executive Director of Rise Ghana, Awal Ahmed Kariama, has called for some metropolitan areas to be weaned off the Districts Common Fund as soon as possible.

According to him, some of the metropolitan areas have the capacity to generate more money than they are allocated through the Common Fund, thus should be encouraged to internally generate funds rather than rely on the central government.

He said this would allow for the government to concentrate on less endowed districts, bringing much-needed development to them.

Speaking on JoyNews’ PM Express, Awal Kariama revealed that this is part of reforms civil society organisations have been calling for, for the advancement of the decentralization of the governance structure.

“One of the things we are also asking for is the fiscal decentralization so that at the fiscal level there is that autonomy for people to be able to generate their revenue. And let me be very blunt here and say that in fact some of us believe that we are using the policy of equality to address inequality.

“There are some metropolitan and district assemblies that do not actually need this common fund. Their internally generated fund alone is several times over the money that the central government gives them as part of the common fund.

“And in fact, if we look at it critically and we want to really be fair and promote local development across the country, I think that some of the metropolitan district assemblies should actually be weaned off the Common Fund,” he said.

He added that in some districts local revenue mobilization strategies can be engineered to enable them improve their ability to generate funds internally.

“So we can say that when you match up a certain amount of money as a local district assembly, then you have a certain capital coming from the central government to add to that. But honestly we need to look at decoupling and reducing, actually weaning off some of the advanced districts from this District Assembly Common Fund,” he stressed.

Meanwhile, he has decried the reluctance of the government to fiscally decouple some of these metropolitan areas from the Common Fund.

According to him, while decoupling them from the Common Fund will bring them the much needed autonomy to put in place strategies to generate their own funds, keeping them hooked to the Common Fund undermines efficiency and proper expenditure planning of these metropolitan areas.

“So you’ll find district assemblies buying things from the centre that they don’t really need, the priorities of the districts are different from what the Ministry of Local Government and the central authority is purchasing for them.

“So we are calling beyond just allocations and then through the District Assembly Common Fund to decentralize fiscally so that the district assemblies will be able to have autonomy to raise their own money as well as to be able to determine their expenditure. But as things stands now, they’re limited in some of the areas because the money comes from the centre,” he said.