乌龙派出所目录,朱丽叶-比诺什,北京回收公司
Functionaries of the then PNDC government at different occasions justified the significance of the local government policy in Ghana. For example, in reacting to the criticism that the district assemblies were nothing but a move by the PNDC to consolidate its position, the chairman of the regime, Jerry John Rawlings stressed that the PNDC strategy and the rationale behind the decentralization policy was to take steps towards more formal political participation by every Ghanaian through the district-level elections which was to take place nationwide in that year. He said, “If we are to see a sturdy tree of democracy grow, we need to learn from the past and nurture very carefully and deliberately political institutions that will become the pillars upon which the people's power will be erected. A new sense of responsibility must be created in each workplace, each village, each district; we already see elements of this in the work of the Committee for the Defence of the Revolution (CDRs), the 31st December Women's Movement, the June 4 Movement, Town and Village Development Committees, and other organizations through which the voice of the people is being heard”. In other words, a democratic local government was supposed to be the foundation for future national level democracy. Before the advent of the 1992 republican constitution in Ghana, the erstwhile PNDC government’s implementation strategy of the decentralization and local government policy encountered stiff opposition from strong democratic forces both within and outside Ghana as the regime’s legitimacy was quizzed. As a result of this legitimacy crisis of the regime, the PNDC government quickly finalized the implementation of the decentralization programme in 1987 to legitimize the regime through the District Assemblies (DAs) which were setup in order to “democratize state power and advance participatory democracy and collective decision making at the grassroots” (District Political Authority and Modalities for District Level Elections 1987:2). This paved way for the existing Local Authorities to be reviewed and restructured into District Assemblies and also new electoral rules such as common platform for all candidates vying for seats in the Assemblies to present their manifestoes to the public at no cost, right of the electorate to recall their Assembly-member before his/her tenure is due, the performance of Assembly’s business in both English and any other local language that was common in the locality, the abolition of property qualification right to stand for elections and non-partisan basis of the elections were among other things that were introduced into the new electoral process. At the end a voter registration exercise was undertaken and the first District Assembly elections were conducted in 1988 with an average national turnout of 58.9% was quite high by all standards especially when it was compared to the Local Council Elections in 1978, which recorded as low as 18% turnout (Oquaye, 1980:82). On that basis, when Ghana decided to change over from military dictatorship to constitutional liberal democracy in 1992, the first multiparty government- the National Democratic Congress (NDC) that came into power in 1993 decided to continue with the process of decentralisation. It therefore consolidated the aim of decentralisation within the new framework of liberal democratic constitution in spite of the fact that some essential democratic elements in the constitution remained compromised. |
