The Chamber of Local Governance (CHALOG) has renewed calls for the privatization of revenue collection within Ghana’s Metropolitan, Municipal, and District Assemblies (MMDAs), following a high-profile fraud case involving officials from the Kumasi Metropolitan Assembly (KMA).
Four staff members from the Revenue Department of the KMA are currently under police investigation in the Ashanti Region for allegedly operating a fake ticketing syndicate at the Kumasi Central Market, defrauding traders and siphoning public funds.
Reacting to the development, CHALOG President Dr. Richard Fiadomor said the case highlights deeper structural weaknesses in Ghana’s local revenue systems. He argued that outsourcing revenue collection to private firms would strengthen accountability and limit the opportunities for internal misappropriation of public funds.
“Revenue collection should be privatised. When the private sector is collecting, they can’t keep it with them for 24 hours because the assembly can monitor. But if it is their staff from the government sector, the money can stay with them for more than 48 hours, leading to the unnecessary depletion of the money,” He emphasized that the scandal is symptomatic of broader governance failures at the assembly level and directly criticized KMA’s leadership for inadequate oversight.
According to Dr. Fiadomor, the assembly’s internal checks, designed to monitor financial flows, have either broken down or are being deliberately circumvented.
“The other way they can go about, is by involving themselves in a serious monitoring, because the assembly has a hierarchy. There is a Chief Executive, Coordinating Director, Finance Officers, and these revenue operators operate under the Finance Officers.”
“For me, the reason why there is difficulty in monitoring them is because some of the Finance Officers are complicit in the matter.”
The scandal has reignited debate over the effectiveness of public financial management at the local level, where weak oversight mechanisms often make assemblies vulnerable to revenue leakages, internal fraud, and inefficiency. CHALOG maintains that privatization, under strict regulatory and contractual safeguards, would not only deter fraud but also improve revenue mobilization and utilization for local development.
Dr. Fiadomor’s call aligns with growing public frustration over corruption in decentralized governance and comes at a time when assemblies are under pressure to boost internally generated funds.
