Pressure mounts on President Akufo-Addo to desolve Northern Development Authority

Some stakeholders are calling on the president, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo to dissolve the current Board of the Northern Development Authority and sack its CEO Dr Suleimana Alhassan Anamzoya, over their internal wrangling and the fight for supremacy.

This comes days after the office of the Northern Development Authority in Tamale was attacked by a group called the Kandahar Boys. Sources suspect that the Kandahar boys were allegedly sent there by the CEO of NDA to stop the board members and the chairman, Dr Hakim Weymah from holding their meeting.

The office was attacked on Friday morning by members of the Kandahar boys, the Invisible Forces and the big six groups,

They accused officials of the Authority of being members of the opposition National Democratic Congress, after an allegation that they only offer jobs to their party sympathizers.

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According to the groups, they have sent several applications to the NDA for assistance but to no avail.

The group is particularly angry at the performance of the party in the region and blamed officials of the NDA and the CEO for their plight.

Stakeholders are also calling on the President, Nana Akufo-Addo to as a matter of urgency review the operations of the Northern Development Authority and reshuffle non-performing CEOs and Directors in a bid to improve performance and reposition the Authority to execute its mandate with potency.

Since the rebranding of the Savannah Development Authority (SADA) to Northern Development Authority, NDA,  little has been heard of  it in terms of  playing key  roles in  strategic projects like the Planting for food and Jobs, One Village one Dam Project, one district one factory initiative as well as poverty alleviation programs.

It is believed that the mandate of the authority is to provide strategic directions on planning and prioritizing of development projects, mobilizing resources including financial resources and investments from both public and private sources but this cannot be seen from this current leadership of the authority. They are also to coordinate development initiatives under the Special Development Ministry, which includes one dam one village project, 1D1F, among others.

However, stakeholders are of the opinion that if the executives of the Authority are ineffectual and unable to live up to expectation, government should be bold and change them with a new team that will be able to transform  the Authority to live up to expectation. These executives are rather dissipating the authorities account without brining any investor or successfully implementing a project to support the people of the northern part of our country or the government’s agenda.

NDA must have an efficient management team that will work to promote the agenda of government in Youth empowerment, jobs creation, education, modernizing agriculture, technology, climate change mitigation and gender mainstreaming in northern Ghana.

NDA must also have a management team that has the skills to source funding from alternate sources to be financially sustainable in executing   pro-poor programmes

Besides, NDA must have enough resources to serve as a source of collateral to incoming investors.

The rebranded NDA must be seen to be performing and doing better than SADA in these areas and not below it.

It will be recalled that NDA was rebranded in 2017 under the Ministry of Special Development Initiatives

This was after The Savannah Accelerated Development Authority (SADA), which was meant to facilitate accelerated development of the northern sectors of the country, had become a vehicle for misappropriation of state funds and wide-spread corruption.

The story of SADA was the saddest in the history of the nation. We at BPPI would not want the mess that was created at SADA under the Mills/ Mahama Administration to be repeated or any form of incompetence to be exhibited under the rebranded Northern Development Fund. We want government to be proactive in this regard and work to revive NDA.