Political Adoption of Constituencies an Implication on Public Financial Management

Introduction
The current trend of defining geographical boundaries as a political constituency by politicians in Ghana is gradually becoming a norm in our political landscape and the cause of our development disparities besides a burden on our national coffers. As such constituencies turn to benefit more projects at the expense of the less privileged constituencies that are not accepted by these swaying politicians.

This emerging trend of uncertainty if not checked can lead to the exploitation of political power, retaining office, and making politicians popular with constituents to strengthen their power base and improve their chances for re-election. They achieve this by advocating for short-term projects as they can engender immediate pay-offs over longer-term projects and with a higher return for their interest.

Ministers and heads of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) leading spending agencies identify constituencies where they want to contest and channel their resources into the adopted constituencies. They do this by increasing their spending on these favored constituencies regardless of the implications for efficiency in the overall level and public expenditure allocations.

They succeed in this game by aligning themselves with particular interest groups and social classes in the constituencies to create preambles for coalition building, especially where interest groups actively lobby politicians. In this case, higher-income groups are likely to be more effective at lobbying than the deprived since they have better resources at their disposal to support these politicians. The self-interested electorates are, however, expected to vote for representatives that bring them benefits at low cost since the typical attitude of the Ghanaian electorate is the quest for freebies without asking how it is financed.

This current practice in our body politics has led constituents and their representatives to demand more geographically targeted public goods than what would be socially beneficial to all. This explains why in this fourth republican regime, the composition of expenditure tends to be skewed towards items that are actively valued and demanded by the non-poor such as higher education and tertiary health care at the expense of effective school feeding programs at the basic level and improved primary healthcare at the rural level.

Funding considered for these projects is customarily secured through the consolidated fund mobilized out of our general taxation which are usually off-budget expenditures with long-term implications for our national debt. Since they are burnt in serving the interests of their constituents at all costs without regard to its implications on the general public and the less privileged, this thereby widens the development disparities with an implication on public expenditure and financial accountability of the country.

Thus, the economic basis of cost and benefit is transformed into political costs and benefits with no due diligence to public financial management. Thus, the programs by far benefit few political constituencies whilst the cost of financing is borne by all including the less privileged constituencies. This practice limits the interest of genuine individuals who want to venture into politics but do not have the financial muscle,

CONCLUSION
To nib this emerging trend in the bud, there should be public financial management reforms aimed at targeting the improvement of the financial management processes on the electronic government procurement system (E-GovP) of these state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and the Ministries and effective corporate governance practice. This would contribute to long-term economic success and the delivery of better social services targeting the fulfillment of the SDGs in all geographical areas in the country.

Again, the objective of such reforms should be part of the development process aimed at maximizing financial efficiency, focusing on improving control of fiscal and budget management while eliminating corruption through the adoption of transparent policies and processes.

HAMDU ABDUL. HAMID (Ph.D)
Institute of Local Government Studies, Accra, Ghana.