Appearing before Parliament’s Appointments Committee during his vetting on Thursday, 27 August, the Minister-designate for Local Government, Chieftaincy, and Religious Affairs, Hon. Mahama Ayariga, pitched a comprehensive digitisation of local revenue collection alongside a complete overhaul of how the nation tackles artisanal small-scale mining.
Addressing the chronic underperformance of Internally Generated Funds (IGF) across Metropolitan, Municipal, and District Assemblies (MMDAs), the nominee highlighted how local socio-political interference undermines property rate collection. He explained that assigning revenue collection to local political actors severely compromises accountability and enforcement.
“When you ask the DCE to go to the chief’s house and collect property rates, I’m sure he will think that you are passing a death sentence on him. You may not easily have a DCE insisting that his constituency chairman should pay property rates,” he observed. He added, “When you leave it to them to collect they may also end up leaving it in the hands of party foot soldiers, families, nephews and etcetera. When they are given that task they feel that it is their reward for supporting a family member to become an MMDCE and so when they collect it they are not supposed to account.”
To dismantle these revenue leaks, Hon. Ayariga pledged to introduce a fully automated, centrally monitored architecture spanning identification, assessment, payment, and allocation.
“I will look at how we can get a system that is centrally monitored, a system that is designed in such a way that it is totally digital in terms of identifying and valuing properties, totally digital in terms of the mechanism for payment and totally digital in terms of the disbursement of the resources,” he stated, maintaining that automation will curb diversion and unlock full financial capacity for local development.
Turning to environmental and rural economic governance, the former Minister for Environment, Science, and Technology reflected on his long-standing engagement with the sector, arguing that the public narrative surrounding illegal mining—popularly termed galamsey—requires revision.
“I have a long standing relationship with small scale mining. If you recall in my previous life I was Minister for Environment, Science and Technology and so in that capacity I was very concerned about small scale mining activities,” he noted. “I think there’s also an issue of nomenclature. What we call galamsey is simply either artisanal mining or small scale mining activity, that’s what we call galamsey. When we term it as galamsey it gives it a negative connotation.”
Hon. Ayariga traced the root cause of illegal mining directly to bureaucratic bottlenecks in securing lawful permits, which deters miners from implementing essential environmental safeguards and safety measures.
“What are the underlying causes? The underlying causes really are that a lot of these young people who want to mine legally have difficulty obtaining the requisite permits to carry out the mining activity,” he said. “And because they don’t have the requisite permits to carry out the mining activity they also consider themselves as illegal actors and because they are illegal actors, all the relevant or required investments to mine properly, safely and reclaim, they don’t do it because they know that they have no right or title and it will be unsafe to make those investments. Otherwise many of them actually have the resources to make the investment.”
To resolve this issue, the nominee advocated integrating structured small-scale mining directly into district-level economic planning, ensuring local authorities take direct supervisory responsibility.
“I want us as a country to rethink and say how about if in every district we identify the actors and where they are carrying out the actions and find a way of ensuring, of course not in water bodies, not pulling down existing cocoa farms and etcetera,” he proposed. “But how about if we strengthen the regime of small-scale artisanal mining and make sure that at the local level the MMDCEs pay close attention to small-scale artisanal mining as an economic activity, as an economic activity.”
By: Rainbowradioonline.com/Ghana