Accra is too big for AMA, Break the Monopoly, Make the Sub-Metros Autonomous

Throughout the world cities are competing with each other for capital, corporate investments, tourists, students, best talents, and the opportunity to host world events among others. City mayors are taking tough decisions and approaching city management in business oriented fashion, bringing stakeholders together and identifying different ways to move their cities forward. To remain competitive and to attract investments mayors are aggressively marketing the potentials and opportunities of their cities, setting up priorities, undertaking physical landscape development, infrastructure building, improving quality of the environment and promoting business friendly atmosphere among others. This means cities are more and more being run like corporations with objective to deliver better services to their clients and to improve the overall quality of life of the people. However these attributes do not currently apply to Accra, Ghana's so called capital city.

Accra is ranked as one of the fastest growing cities in the world. According to the 2000 population and housing census, Accra has about 1.7 million but a recent survey conducted by Instinct Media with funds from the World Bank has revealed that the population of Accra in 2009 was 3.5 million with a growth rate of 4.4 per cent per annum. According to www.peacefmonline.com and www.myjoyonline.com which reported on the findings of the survey “Residents of the Accra Metropolis have identified provision of better places of convenience, improvement in sanitation and drainage as well as refuse and solid waste disposal services as their priorities of concern. In addition, provision of water, public markets, basic education and roads were other infrastructure and services needed most by the residents”.

The findings of the survey are nothing new except that it points to the systemic failures on the part of the Accra Metropolitan Assembly to deliver high quality service to residents of Accra. It confirms that the task of managing Accra continues to overwhelm the AMA and that the AMA has no solution to the problems confronting the communities that make up the city. Evidence of the endemic failures can be seen from the myriad of problems seen in the city: from waste management to housing, to water delivery to electricity supply, to roads, to education, to environmental quality, to traffic management and to telecommunication. It is common to find uncollected waste tipping and spilling into gutters and roads which give evidence of the existence of a bungling waste management system.

In Accra as in most of our cities it is unthinkable to have 365 days continuous supply of electricity, a problem that can be explained in terms of management and technology; and it is the management aspect that is sending Accra to its grave. For example there are communities without water and schools without toilet facilities. Many residents of Accra do not have access to good drinking water. In many communities such as Teshie-Nungua reliable piped water supply is a serious problem and many households have to resort to extreme measures to be able to cope.

Sewerage in Accra is almost absent except some few suburbs (usually where the rich people live). Choked gutters, dilapidated infrastructure with the associated environmental and health risks have become part and parcel of everyday life in the city. There is no centralized wastewater treatment system in the city and households and commercial premises generally have no onsite flush latrines. Today despite the availability of technology to convert night soil into biogas, night soil is still openly disposed at various parts of the city including the one near Achimota posing serious health and environmental risk to the people who live nearby. Within Accra solid waste is unhygienically treated and disposed; and indiscriminate dumping of waste is creating health hazards.

With the exception of Cantonments, Airport Residential Area, East Legon and some few other places that boast of decent housing and other facilities, a greater part of the city looks like a giant slum with narrow dirt streets and poorly constructed and crowded houses dominating the landscape with majority of houses lacking any decent facilities such as electricity, toilet, and water. Compounding these problems is the continuous influx of people into Accra in search of non-existing jobs. The influx of the people add up to the pressure on the already existing problem of inadequate housing, schools, transport, water, electricity, health and other public services.

But these problems are linked to a bigger problem. Accra remains largely unplanned: without the infrastructures to support the economic activities and the growing number of people moving to live in the city. For example there is only one option left to all travelers to and from the city: road. There are no trams, efficient and reliable railway system and ferries. All goods and people enter the city by road, even from coastal towns such as Cape Coast and Takoradi where ferries could be employed to ease the transportation problem in the city. The roads are themselves narrow, dirt, poorly surfaced and heavily potholed. This explains why in the morning, afternoon and evening the roads are choked with cars, bringing with it the ubiquitous traffic jams that disrupt business and make Accra unattractive as a business hub.

There are few open spaces, gardens and other facilities that could make her fit the status of a functioning capital city. There is no coordination between utility suppliers. For instance the urban roads will construct a road today, tomorrow you see Vodafone or ECG digging the newly constructed road to lay their cables leading experts to question the kind of coordination and interaction that exist between utility suppliers and institutions such as Roads and Highways.

What is obvious is that the size of the city, the size of the population and the demand for high quality services are posing both managerial and logistical problems to AMA resulting in the failures the World Bank Survey has highlighted. Despite being the sole recipient of the District Assemblies' Common Fund and proceeds of billions of taxes collected annually the challenges remain unresolved and the AMA looks completely irrelevant in the face of these problems and challenges.

What is more, the Sub-Metros which are supposed to deal with the problems in the communities have so far failed because they are poorly resourced. The Sub-Metros seem not to have any share of the District Assemblies' Common Fund. At the same time the tax they collect themselves is hijacked by the greedy and the non-performing AMA, a problem created by the Local Government Act. The Act has concentrated too much power and resources within the AMA; yet the AMA seems not to know what to do with the power and resources at her disposal. It is the misuse of power and the resources coupled with poor management decisions which has brought Accra to her kneels.

Breaking the monopoly
The solution to Accra's problems lies in carrying further the decentralisation programme in Accra. What Accra needs is devolution, that is taking power away from the dysfunctional AMA and giving it to the eleven Sub-Metros and communities so they can better manage their affairs. The Sub-Metros must be made autonomous of AMA; they must be given Municipality status and be made to keep the revenues they collect for the development of their communities. Therefore the monopoly of the AMA which has made it a white elephant should be eliminated. The main objective of the making the Sub-Metros autonomous is to stimulate growth within the autonomous sub-metros, provide high quality services to the communities and to improve the quality of life of people who live in the Sub Metros.

The advantages of making the Sub-Metros autonomous municipalities are manifold. Accra can be better managed when the Sub-Metros are made financially independent and are empowered to collect and spend the money they collect to improve the communities that fall within their jurisdiction rather than collect the money and give it to AMA only for it to be wasted on projects that have little impact on the quality of life of the people. While the Sub-Metros collect tolls, fees and other taxes the AMA spends it sometimes with no input from the Sub-Metros. Meanwhile some of the Sub-Metros do not even have basic logistics such as computers, stationery and vehicles despite collecting hundreds of millions of cedis every year for the AMA. Making the Sub-Metros autonomous will give them the opportunity to acquire the necessary logistics to better manage the communities.

Again making the Sub-Metros independent will stimulate economic growth, job creation, and better service delivery within Accra. This growth is currently unattainable because the AMA has too much on its plate and has no time to attend to the needs of the communities. This explains the damning report that the World Bank has published showing that there is a serious gap between what the people want and what AMA is doing.

Furthermore, the Sub-Metros are much closer to the communities and the people and therefore know the problems in the communities far better than the opaque AMA whose officials seem to be interested in taxes from the Sub-Metros and not the welfare of the communities. The Sub-Metros are closer to the utility providers such as water and electricity and can work closely with them to solve the utility problems in the communities better than the far-removed AMA which knows nothing about what goes on in the communities and the problems and challenges the people who live there face.

Additionally, unlike the current situation where AMA has been a jack of all trade and master of none, each of the eleven Sub-Metros can adequately and efficiently perform the tasks currently shouldered by AMA. Based on their strengths and weaknesses each of the Sub-Metros can specialise in some key sectors of the economy in which they have comparative advantage to engineer growth, and raise quality of life of people in the city. For example the Sub-Metro where Korle Lagoon is situated can devote resources to transform the Lagoon and its environs into nature reserve or tourist/holiday destination ('Ecotourism City') by depolluting the Lagoon, and embarking on other infrastructural development projects to attract hospitality industry actors. Thus the Lagoon and its environs could be developed to promote ecotourism in that Municipality.

The Sub-Metro(s) where University of Ghana, Achimota School, and Legon Presby Secondary School (PRESEC) are situated can turn the area into a 'Knowledge City' by encouraging companies such as Vodafone, MTN, Zain, Glo, Tigo, Kasa Pa and other technology industries in the country to take advantage of the schools and the high quality of students available to establish research in science and technology and other business incubators. The Sub-Metro around Osu can turn the area into a 'Retail Centre of Accra' by encouraging the building of shopping malls and other retail outlets to attract consumers and visitors to area.

Sub-Metros with adequate land can turn their area into 'residential hub' or 'manufacturing hub' of the city of Accra by encouraging investors to build a hybrid of houses for the different class of people living in the city.

In addition to the above, the independent municipalities can initiate their own development polices and programmes aim at attracting investors. Such development policies and programmes are likely to create competition between them, a condition which is necessary for the growth currently lacking in Accra. The competition also has the potential to force non-performing Municipalities to sit up and serve their communities. Accra will gain in terms of the hybrid policies that will be carried out by each of the autonomous Municipalities. The advantage of these initiatives in terms of job creation, better quality service, and infrastructural improvement cannot be overemphasised. There is no doubt that the AMA is not performing because it faces no competition. The AMA would have performed better if there were rivals competing with her for the attention of the people but as the situation stands today AMA is a monopoly, with no desire to deliver high quality service to the people. This monopoly needs to be taken down if Accra is to see real development.

A study conducted in 2004 to ascertain how the District Assemblies utilise their share of the Common Fund indicated that for most District Assemblies a major part of the Common Fund was swallowed by salaries of workers with very little going into community development and for provision of services. The AMA was not exception in this. This explains why majority of the communities do not have access to basic facilities and infrastructures such as toilet and water. Besides there is very little accountability with respect to what AMA does with the hundreds of millions of cedis it receives and collects annually. Breaking the monopoly will therefore open up the AMA to greater scrutiny.

Conditions for a successful Sub-Metro
The conditions for a successful Sub-Metro are that those who run these Sub-Metros must be drawn from the communities forming the Sub-Metros. Again they must not be imposed on the people, they must be people who live in the Sub-Metros, who know the problems of the communities and are prepared to solve them with the people. In short they must be people who are not there because of politics.

Again the Sub-Metros must coordinate with national policy-makers but they must not rely entirely on national policy makers to advocate for the economic and social development of their localities. That is the leadership of the Sub-Metros must move away from reliance on national policy-makers and generate their own policies that will take advantage of the resources in the area and use it to better the lives of its citizens.

People who live in these autonomous Sub-Metros must be made to feel part of it. They must be made to understand that they are the citizens of the Sub-Metro and therefore direct beneficiaries of anything that goes in there (whether good or bad). Each of the autonomous sub-metros must embark on vigorous campaign to educate its citizens and integrate them in the decision-making process. Special Boards staffed with experts and non- experts must be set up in each of these autonomous metros to plan for the development. The boards could include Economic Development Board, Energy Board, Land, Housing, Education, Sanitation, Water, Transport and Telecommunication Boards.

Since all Sub-Metros are not equally endowed with resources it could be suggested that the Common Fund that goes to AMA annually should be divided among the Sub-Metros based on the same formula used to distribute the District Assemblies' Common Fund. In addition less endowed autonomous Sub-Metros must be supported by the State until they are strong enough to stand on their feet.

Conclusion
In conclusion making the Sub-Metros autonomous will give them the power to formulate their own policies. It will give them the power to strategise to mobilise resources internally and externally for the common good of the people and for the greater good of Accra. The formulation of policies and strategies will enable each of the Sub-Metros to attract investors to partner them to deliver jobs, better housing, and better services to the people. The competition between these autonomous Municipalities with separate but coordinated policies and programmes will make Accra the golden city we all want it to be. For now AMA's monopoly is a liability Accra does not need and breaking it for the good of Accra must be a priority of the Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development.