First Deputy Speaker of Parliament Joseph Osei-Owusu has registered his displeasure over the deliberate misuse of public funds by some assemblies in the country.

He said most heads of various metropolitan, municipal, and district assemblies (MMDAs) use their Internally Generated Funds (IGFs) for their personal ends on Fridays, a situation which was affecting their assemblies’ revenue generation.

Debating the approval of a sum of GHS506million for the 2017 annual budget estimates of the Local Government Service on Wednesday 22 March, the First Deputy Speaker, who is also the Member of Parliament for Bekwai, urged the Local Government Committee of parliament to ensure proper use of the IGFs by assemblies to develop the country.

“I want to charge the committee to look into the accounting for the IGF. It is not the case that they do not collect the money, it is the case that the monies they collect do not come to the assemblies. All of us MPs know what they do with the monies on Fridays. …We all know, so let’s be bold and tackle that, because the Common Fund comes [so] they use the IGF as their personal thing to facilitate everything other than working for the communities,” he stated.

Meanwhile, the Vice Chairman of the Local Government Committee, Kwasi Boateng Agyei, said assemblies like the Kumasi Metropolitan Assembly (KMA) and others must up their game to improve their IGF generation.

“The problem of revenue generation has afflicted all our assemblies. The service we are told is making efforts to try and improve performance at the local level. The issue that we have with the decentralised units over the years has been the over-reliance on central government by way of releases, and by way of grants for their own performance. Some of the district assemblies, their performance are abysmally low that sometimes you don’t understand what’s happening in these assemblies. The last time we had an engagement with the officials of the local government ministry, a place like KMA, which for some of us had all the resources and whatever it takes to be able to generate revenue, was doing so abysmally low that it’s about 33 per cent. So, we expect that the service will look at that particular area and improve upon performance at the assembly level,” he noted.