Appointment of Ghana’s Local Government Chief Executives: A Setback on Accountability?

This paper aims at examining the impact of president’s appointment of local government Chief Executives (Mayor) on accountability in Ghana’s local governments. Ghana after three decades of decentralisation and local governance is still in search method of choosing the chief executives for the various local governments. Most scholars and ordinary citizens are calling for a paradigm shift from the current arrangement of appointment to an arrangement in which the citizens themselves will elect their Chief executives to make them more accountable and responsive. Contrarily this paper seeks to question the notion that elections of Metropolitan/Municipal/District Chief Executives (MMDCEs) are a recipe for effective accountability. Rather the paper argues that election is just one out of a many mechanisms of accountability and has proving insufficient in other jurisdictions and calls for strengthened accountable mechanisms that are already enshrined in the Constitution and other Legal provisions. The paper is based on a review of various literature on elections of local government Chief Executives (Mayor), public sector accountability from Principal-agent perspective in the public sector and 1992 Constitution of Ghana and Local Government Act of 1993, (Act 462) and the new Act, 2016 (936) as well as other relevant documents.

Keywords: Accountability, principal-agent model, local government, election of MMDCEs (Mayors) Ghana.