Mr Abdallah Abubakari, the Northern Regional Minister, has expressed displeasure at some metropolitan, municipal and district assemblies (MMDAs) in the region for “sleeping on the job” thereby failing to meet their revenue targets.

The Minister, who was commenting on the performance of MMDAs in the region in terms of revenue generation, said: “Though some assemblies have done fairly well in this direction and they need to be commended, many others are still sleeping on the job and therefore need to wake up and perform to expectation”.

Mr Abubakari was speaking at the first meeting of the Northern Regional Coordinating Council (NRCC) in Tamale to assess the NRCC’s monitoring and coordinating roles in the region and to devise strategies for the future.

For the 2016 financial year, the 26 MMDAs in the region are collectively expected to collect an amount of GH? 15, 583,243.00 as internally generated funds.

Mr Abubakari said as at the end of the first quarter of the year, all the MMDAs managed to collect only GH? 2, 257,343.00 representing 14.49 per cent of the estimated amount to be collected within the year.

He, therefore, urged metropolitan, municipal and district chief executives of assemblies that were not doing well to come out with strategies to enhance their IGF collection.

Mr Abubakari appealed to MMDAs to speed up work on mandatory projects contained in their Annual Action Plan for this year to enhance their service delivery in the areas of health and education.

Touching on the peace and security in the region, he called on chief executives of MMDCEs and District Security Committees to take more pro-active measures to reduce conflicts before they got out of control.

He said this year’s elections called for security to be beefed up and urged the security agencies to put their intelligence mechanisms to work to track would-be trouble makers “so that we come out of the elections more united as a people”.