Accra, Aug. 7, GNA - An Assemblyman on Monday said the time had not yet come for District Chief Executives (DCEs) to be elected arguing that there was the need to build a solid decentralized base before thinking of electing DCEs.

According to Mr Vincent Azumah, Assembly member of the Mafi Sasekpe electoral area in the North Tongu District in the Volta Region, decentralization was a process and not an event. Unfortunately, he said, Ghana's decentralization process had been regarded as an event by many and had thus resulted in the current debate of the election of DCEs, which was regarded as the answer to the woes of the assembly system.

"We must ensure that we keep a small, empowered and resourced team of assembly members, who understand what participation in democracy means and can educate the electorate in their areas on national and global developments that affect their areas," Mr Azumah said when he conducted journalists round his area.

"We must also make sure that all assemblies have the required complement of professionals."

Mr Azumah also noted that assembly members were supposed to be the most powerful in terms of decision-making in the districts because they spoke for the people, who elected them. In reality, however, it was the DCE and the Presiding Members, who wielded the power, he said. He said to bring in further checks and balances there must be a clause in the Local Government Act, which should prevent Government appointees from becoming Presiding Members.

Mr Azumah also noted that more than 12 years after the Local Government Act, which called for decentralization, the field agencies were largely not integrated into the district assemblies. They still received their funds and authorization from the headquarters and in many instances had no control over many development projects in the districts, he said.

Mr Azumah said those, who had argued that electing the DCE would make him or her accountable to the people in the district had forgotten that many Members of Parliament had not been accountable to their constituents.

They had been elected into Parliament because they belonged to a particular party and, therefore, engaged in parliamentary issues on purely partisan lines and not in the interest of the electorate. On development projects, Mr Azumah expressed regret about the state of roads in the area and called on the Department of Feeder Roads and other contract awarding agencies in the Region not to award road and other contracts to wrong contractors, who either did shoddy work or did not work at all.

Making reference to the road that linked the Mafi Traditional area to the Akatsi District, Mr Azumah said even though the road was awarded to a contractor in December 2005, nothing had been done on it. Even though the Department of Feeder Roads had confirmed that the contract was in the process of being awarded to a new contractor, the choice of a wrong contractor in the first place had already caused foodstuff to rot on the farms.

Mr Azumah appealed for the completion of the Mafi Sasekpe Clinic, which was already six months behind schedule. 7 Aug. 06