Editorial: Ghana’s Cities Are Suffocating Under Decades Of Policy Failure

For years, Ghana’s political leadership has spoken glowingly about decentralization, while presiding over its steady decay. The Chronicle finds this duplicity intolerable. The collapse of local governance has fuelled mass rural–urban migration and exposed a transport system so dysfunctional that it now threatens productivity, public safety and national cohesion.

Let us be blunt. Ghana’s local governance system has become a farce. What was constitutionally designed to drive equitable development has instead been reduced to a ceremonial structure—expensive to maintain, impressive on paper and largely moribund in practice.

Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies (MMDAs) have neither the autonomy nor the resources to meaningfully develop their jurisdictions, yet they remain convenient shields behind which central government hides its failures.

The Chronicle observes that decentralisation in Ghana has been deliberately hollowed out. District Chief Executives owe their allegiance to appointing authorities, not to the citizens they govern. Assemblies are starved of funds, development plans gather dust, and local initiative is stifled by political interference. This is not accidental, it is systemic.

The consequences are devastating. Large portions of rural and peri-urban Ghana have been effectively abandoned. With no jobs, poor infrastructure and limited services, citizens are being pushed -not pulled – into urban centres. This forced migration is the clearest indictment of Ghana’s failed local development agenda.

Yet, even as cities absorb this influx, government has shown little urgency in planning for it. Accra, Kumasi and other major cities are now monuments to policy failure, characterised by suffocating congestion and an overwhelmed transport system. The Chronicle finds it unacceptable that such conditions have been allowed to fester for decades with no comprehensive response.

Nearly 70 per cent of Ghanaians depend on public transport, yet the state has abdicated its responsibility to provide a functional mass transit system. Instead, mobility has been surrendered to an informal network dominated by transport unions, particularly the GPRTU, which now wields enormous power with minimal accountability. This situation is not reform, it is retreat.

The Chronicle has repeatedly pointed out that transport in Ghana is governed more by political convenience than by planning. Laws exist, regulatory agencies exist, and policies exist but enforcement is selectively applied or completely ignored. The result is a chaotic system where sub-standard vehicles operate freely, terminals are lawless, and commuter safety is treated as an afterthought.

Equally disturbing is the persistent concentration of national investment in Accra. With about 86 per cent of foreign direct investment channelled into the capital, government has entrenched a development model that rewards centralisation and punishes the regions. The Chronicle rejects the dangerous assumption that developing Accra alone equates to developing Ghana.

The near-total neglect of the railway sector further underscores the absence of strategic thinking. Rail transport – cheaper, safer and more efficient for mass movement – has been sacrificed to decades of policy inertia. Roads are overburdened, logistics costs are rising and congestion is worsening, yet railway revival remains trapped in rhetoric. The Chronicle maintains that any “Big Push” agenda that sidelines rail is intellectually dishonest.

Perhaps the most tragic outcome of this failure is public resignation. Ghanaians have been conditioned to accept dysfunction as normal. Traffic jams, transport indiscipline and hours lost daily are now treated as inevitable. The Chronicle warns that this normalisation of failure is a grave threat to democratic accountability.

We, therefore, state without apology that Ghana’s transport crisis is not accidental. It is the logical outcome of a broken local governance system, distorted investment priorities and a persistent lack of political courage.

We reiterate that Ghana is not Accra. Until government commits to genuine fiscal decentralisation, balanced regional development and fearless transport reform, free from union intimidation and political timidity, this crisis will deepen.

We at The Chronicle will continue to speak plainly, because silence in the face of such systemic failure would amount to complicity!

 

 

For more news, join The Chronicle Newspaper channel on WhatsApp: https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VbBSs55E50UqNPvSOm2z

 

The post Editorial: Ghana’s Cities Are Suffocating Under Decades Of Policy Failure appeared first on The Ghanaian Chronicle.

Read Full Story