A former Member of Parliament (MP) for the Upper Manya Krobo District and opinion leader, Mr Charles Narh is asking government to proceed cautiously in efforts to get Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies (MMDAs) to audit all projects funded with petroleum revenues.
In his view, the MMDAs are not yet ready to carry that responsibility on their shoulders. Government, he recommended should rather provide them with adequate resources to ensure they can provide what is expected of them.
“As at now, the MMDAs cannot effectively audit government projects. They will need to be well tooled to be able to do that,” Mr Narh told Business Finder after a public forum organised by the Public Interest and Accountability Committee (PIAC) to inform the public on the management and use of Ghana’s oil revenues.
Government recently begun engaging planning and development officers in MMDAs to conduct planning, monitoring and evaluation of all oil funded projects across the country.
The initiative is being jointly spearheaded by the Ministry of Planning, Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Local Government, National Development Planning Commission (NDPC), Public Interest and Accountability Committee (PIAC) and the Ministry of Monitoring and Evaluation.
At a two–day training session with planning officers drawn from the Ashanti and Brong Ahafo regions, Technical Director with the Ministry of Planning, Dr Ishmael Ackah admitted that “there has always been a de-link between the plans prepared at the national level and what enters the budget and when this happens, they don’t get the ownership and they don’t monitor.”
The engagement is to decentralize the process of identifying needs, choosing projects to be funded with oil revenues and monitoring the projects to their completion.
“We will be in Accra and we will say that Project A has been completed in a certain district and fortunately the district will not be aware and will not track it, especially projects funded by oil money.
“This has led to ghost projects, time over-runs on projects and even cost over-runs and we are losing millions of money through this kind of process,” Dr Ackah added.
But Mr Narh who narrated his experience with the Ministry of Local Government said a similar training programme was held for some members of district assemblies on pilot basis with the objective of auditing government projects.
The training according to him was to enable the carry out social auditing “so that all government projects will be audited by the trainees and the results presented to the district assemblies.” According to him, the trainees after the workshops were not authorized to undertake the audits as no certificates were given. “We were poorly resourced and so could hardly apply what they had been trained to do. After the training, we have become dormant because the resources are unavailable,” he said.
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