Nii Boye Laryea
The Okaikoi North Municipal Assembly (ONMA) has a shopping mall project on its to-do-list modalities for which the Municipal Chief Executive (MCE) Nii Boye Laryea aka Nii Aniya says have been decided upon.
The Private, Public Partnership (PPP) module to be applied for the project, the MCE said, is in tandem with law.
Speaking to the DAILY GUIDE last weekend he hinted that the shopping mall when completed would be named after the National Chief Imam; the cleric’s residence is within the municipality.
The shopping mall project will be undertaken through the collaboration of the Ministry of Local Government And Rural Development and the ONMA. It would be expected to among other things boost the socio-economic development of the municipality; the ultimate revenue generation being a critical factor also.
Being a new municipality and created within an area with dearth of land, the municipal assembly, he said is currently without its full complement of departments. The education department for instance he said is vast for which reason an attached building to the current site housing of the assembly was rented and awaiting renovation.
The current location housing the headquarters of the ONMA was hired and renovated; he said, explaining that ‘we were occupying a place not convenient at all for office work until we acquired this place.’
The ONMA encompasses two constituencies Okaikwei North constituency and Okaikwei Central and extends to Achimota he said, adding that the AMA has three constituencies. Abeka being the headquarters of the ONMA poses peculiar challenges; ‘Achimota is endowed with land for the needed development of the office accommodation but moving the capital to that location can address the land dearth issue. That would however require an alteration to the Legislative Instrument (LI) instituting the municipal assembly with its capital in Abeka.’
Continuing he said ‘offices for the immigration unit, ambulance and others are unavailable and efforts to identify and rent shelters for these to function have not yielded any fruit, with property owners not enthused about doing so. We need to construct structures for courts in the municipality but this is yet to be done.’
He is optimistic however, that things would pan out well. The ONMA was established by LI 2307 in 2017 under the Local Governance Act 2016, Act 936.
By A.R. Gomda