Dr. Kwabena Duffuor, a former Governor of the Bank of Ghana, has urged the National Democratic Congress (NDC) to work to restore the authority and effectiveness of traditional rulers for national cohesion, progress and development.
“The NDC must include the empowerment of chiefs and traditional authorities in their manifesto to show how serious they take the institution of Chieftaincy as partners in development,” he stressed.
Dr Duffuor, who was a former Minister of Finance, proposed to the NDC the restoration of authority and responsibility of traditional authorities as top priority in a future NDC government, and should be clearly encapsulated in the manifesto the party would be putting before the citizenry at the next elections.
According to him, the next NDC government should enter into renewed partnership with traditional authorities and give them fraction of all revenue generated from their communities, so as to have opportunity to care for their people, community institutions and infrastructure while also being answerable to the state.
“Giving our chiefs back their status as well as sustainable income for the progress, growth and development of their local communities and its institutions will incentivise them to ensure their communities grow and prosper, as communities success was their own success and vice versa.
“The chieftaincy institution has long been at the forefront of governance before arrival of the Europeans in the 15th century which emerged from the people’s need to come together for security and protection and thus traditional authorities were enjoined to protect and add value to their communities through civic engagement with their subjects.
Today, we are witnessing inadequate interaction between customary and modern local governance with the constitutional sidelining of traditional authorities, which has led to the progressive weakening of the chieftaincy institution with its attendant national crisis,” Dr Duffuor postulated.
