Building Coherent Governance for Modernization in Ghana: From Village to City

Building a Coherent Governance Architecture from Village to City

If Ghana is to build a solid foundation for modernization, local government must be rebuilt from the ground up.

~ Dr. H Aku Kwapong

If Ghana is serious about modernization, then it must finally accept a lesson that every successful developmental state has learned the hard way: Order precedes growth. Not authoritarian order, but institutional order – clear definitions, clear responsibilities, and clear lines of accountability. Without these, decentralisation is mere theatre and development remains episodic.

This article builds directly on the argument that villages, towns, and cities must be the foundational units of governance. What follows is a concrete governance architecture designed to replace Ghana’s current chaotic social organization with a system that is legible, scalable, and capable of sustained delivery.

The principle is simple: Define settlements clearly, attach non-negotiable service obligations to each category, assign professional or elected managers, align authority upward through districts, and integrate traditional authority into a modern advisory structure rather than leaving it in constitutional limbo.

Defining Settlements for Modernization: Minimum Amenities for Dignity and Growth

1. Defining the Village and Its Minimum Amenities

A village should be defined as a rural settlement of fewer than 5,000 people, primarily engaged in agriculture, fishing, or small-scale trade.

The purpose of village governance is not sophistication; it is dignity, basic service reliability, and connection to markets and higher-order settlements.

Each village must be guaranteed 15 minimum amenities, delivered consistently nationwide:

• Safe drinking water through boreholes or small piped systems
• Basic sanitation facilities and waste collection points
• A functional primary school
• A community health post staffed with trained personnel
• Rural electrification or community energy solutions
• All-weather feeder road connection to the nearest town
• Community meeting hall
• Digital connectivity point or shared internet access
• Agricultural extension services
• Village market shed
• Local security post
• Fire and emergency response access
• Public lighting
• Sports and recreation field
• Public arts, culture, and music theatre to preserve and celebrate local heritage

A settlement that does not meet these standards is not underperforming; it is misclassified.

2. Defining the Town and Its Minimum Amenities

A town should be defined as an urbanizing settlement of 5,000 to 50,000 people, serving as a commercial, social, and administrative hub for surrounding villages.

Towns are the hinge of development. When towns work, villages integrate into markets and cities grow without chaos. When towns fail, the entire system fractures.

Each town must meet 15 minimum amenities:

• Piped water system
• Organized waste collection and landfill access
• Reliable electricity supply
• Primary and secondary schools
• A fully staffed clinic or polyclinic
• Paved internal road network
• Central market with storage facilities
• Banking and basic financial services
• Internet connectivity and digital services hub
• Public transport terminal
• Police and fire services
• Affordable housing zones
• Public parks and green spaces
• Sports facilities
• Public arts, culture, and music theatre as a civic institution

A town anywhere in Ghana should broadly mean the same thing to citizens, investors, and planners.

3. Defining the City and Its Minimum Amenities

A city should be defined as a settlement of more than 50,000 people with diversified economic activity and complex infrastructure needs.

Cities are engines of productivity, but only when governed as unified systems rather than fragmented political districts.

Each city must meet 10 minimum amenities:

• Uninterrupted water supply
• Reliable electricity and energy redundancy
• Fully equipped hospitals
• Tertiary education institutions
• Integrated public transport system
• Formal land use planning and zoning
• Affordable housing programs
• Advanced waste management and sanitation
• Public safety and emergency services
• City-wide digital infrastructure

Cities that cannot deliver these services are not failing cities; they are administratively fragmented ones.

The Indispensable Role of Culture in Modernization

You are probably right to anticipate the question why a public arts and theatre is required for a village and a town. It sounds ornamental on the surface. In a country still struggling with water systems, roads, and sanitation, why insist that public arts, culture, and music theatres belong on the same list of minimum amenities as clinics or schools?

The answer is that modernization is not only an economic project; it is a social one. Societies that neglect their cultural infrastructure almost always pay for it later in fragmentation, alienation, and weak civic identity.

First, culture is how communities create shared memory. Villages and towns are not merely collections of households; they are social organisms. Theatre halls, music spaces, cultural centers, and performance grounds are where communities mark time. Festivals, storytelling, drama, music, rites of passage, and public debate all converge in these spaces. They are where a community remembers itself. Without them, memory becomes private and fragmented. With them, identity becomes collective and durable.

Town halls, opera houses, civic theatres, and public performance spaces were foundational in Europe’s city-building, in East Asia’s modernization, and in post-war nation-building across Asia. These were not luxuries; they were tools for social cohesion.

Research in urban economics and sociology consistently shows that towns with accessible cultural institutions have higher civic participation, stronger volunteer networks, and greater trust in local institutions. These are not abstract virtues; they directly affect governance. Communities with shared civic spaces resolve disputes more peacefully, mobilize more easily for collective action, and hold leaders to account more effectively.

One of the tragedies of disorganized development is that it often produces economic change alongside cultural insecurity. People experience modernization as loss rather than progress. That breeds resistance, nostalgia politics, and identity conflict.

Public cultural institutions mitigate this risk. They provide continuity amid change. They allow communities to tell their own stories, reinterpret traditions, and pass on values in ways that evolve rather than fossilize. Countries like South Korea and Japan understood this deeply. Their modernization projects invested heavily in cultural preservation and contemporary cultural production at the local level, even as they industrialized aggressively.

Finally, arts spaces are engines of local economic activity. This is often underestimated. Cultural centers create demand for local services, support artisans, musicians, writers, technicians, and educators, and stimulate night-time and weekend economies. UNESCO estimates that cultural and creative industries contribute over 3 percent of global GDP and employ more people worldwide than the automotive industry. At the local level, even modest cultural venues generate multiplier effects through tourism, hospitality, and informal enterprise.

In towns and villages, these spaces often become the seedbeds for talent. Music scenes, theatre groups, and storytelling traditions that later reach national or international prominence almost always begin in local halls and community stages. Without physical venues, talent dissipates or migrates prematurely.

Chaotic societies are not just poorly governed; they are poorly narrated. When a nation’s public life is dominated by gossip, rumor, and spectacle, it is often because there are no dignified spaces for structured expression, reflection, and storytelling. Having public arts and cultural institutions creates rhythm. They anchor calendars. They replace noise with form. In doing so, they quietly reinforce discipline, patience, and shared standards. These traits matter enormously for modernization, even if they never appear in budget tables.

This is why public arts, culture, and music theatres belong on the list of minimum amenities for villages and towns. Not because they are decorative, but because they are foundational. They are where communities build memory, transmit values, cultivate talent, and experience belonging beyond kinship or politics.

A country that builds roads but neglects cultural spaces produces movement without meaning. A country that builds markets but neglects cultural institutions produces commerce without cohesion. Modernization that ignores culture does not fail immediately. It fails slowly, socially, and irreversibly.

If Ghana is serious about building orderly villages, functional towns, and resilient cities, then it must invest not only in pipes and pavements, but in the places where people gather to remember who they are and imagine who they can become.

Taking Politics Out of Settlement Status

Now, let’s get back to what is being stated loudly: what we have in Ghana today is not how a modern state functions. A country cannot plan infrastructure, staffing, or public finance when settlements simply spring up, regions just get created, and immediately claim entitlements. Nor can development be driven by party manifestos that promise amenities on the fly, untethered from population size, settlement maturity, or service capacity. That approach turns public goods into political favors and replaces standards with grandstanding.

Settlement status must therefore cease to be political. It must become procedural and legal.

Any settlement in Ghana should be formally recognized as a village, town, or city only through a clear statutory process. Recognition should trigger obligations on both sides. Citizens gain predictable access to a defined bundle of public services, and the state gains clarity on what it must deliver, when, and where. Once a settlement is legally classified, the minimum set of required amenities becomes a binding public contract that any government of the day must honor. Development ceases to be a manifesto gimmick and becomes a legal obligation.

Designation should be based on four non-negotiable criteria:

1. Population thresholds verified by census data. No settlement should be classified on the basis of anecdote or political pressure. Population size must be measured, verified, and periodically updated. This immediately eliminates opportunistic claims and aligns service provision with actual demand.
2. Demonstrated ability to meet minimum service standards. A settlement seeking village or town status must show that it can sustain the basic infrastructure appropriate to that level, whether through existing facilities, committed funding, or phased development plans. Status should reflect capacity, not aspiration.
3. Independent infrastructure and service audits. Classification decisions must be informed by objective assessments conducted by professionals insulated from local and national politics. Roads, water systems, schools, health posts, and utilities should be inspected and certified against national benchmarks.
4. Approval by some kind of a National Settlement Classification Board. This body should be statutory, technocratic, and independent, with representation from planning agencies, local government, and civil society. Its mandate would be to apply rules consistently across the country, ensuring that a village or town in one region means the same thing as in another.

Upgrading from village to town, or from town to city, must be incremental, evidence-based, and insulated from election cycles. Status changes should occur on fixed review intervals tied to census updates and infrastructure audits, not to campaign seasons. This alone would remove one of the most persistent distortions in Ghana’s development process.

One of the quiet sources of disorder in Ghana’s social organization is the absence of a serious legal process governing how settlements come into existence and how they are recognized by the state. At present, villages and towns often emerge informally. A handful of households settle on land, a chief or local influencer makes a claim, and before long demands are made for a school, a clinic, electricity, or roads. The state is then pressured to respond, not because a settlement meets any objective standard, but because political incentives reward visibility over order.

In short, settlements should no longer be created by political impulse and serviced by political promises. They should be recognized by law, governed by standards, and serviced by obligation. That is how a state regains control over its spatial development. Without that control, no serious modernization is possible.

Managing Our Settlements: Professional Leadership from the Ground Up

Once processes are defined and a minimum set of amenities is attached to villages, towns, and cities, the next unavoidable question is this: Who actually manages the places where people live their daily lives, build neighborhoods, raise families, and create livelihoods?

This is where Ghana has failed most decisively.

We once had a functioning local administrative system. It was imperfect and colonial in origin, but it understood something fundamental: Places require managers. Order does not emerge spontaneously. After independence, instead of modernizing that system and domesticating it to democratic control, we dismantled it without replacing it with an equally disciplined alternative. The transition was mismanaged, and the institutional vacuum that followed has never been filled.

Countries like Singapore, Malaysia, and South Korea faced the same historical moment. They inherited colonial administrative structures, stripped them of their political domination, professionalized them, and embedded them into modern governance. Ghana did the opposite. We politicized administration, hollowed out local management, and hoped participation would substitute for competence. It never does.

If Ghana is to build a solid foundation for modernization, local government must be rebuilt from the ground up, starting with who manages villages, towns, and cities.

Village Managers and Village Councils

Each village must have a properly constituted Village Council, elected by residents and grounded in law. That council’s most important responsibility is not ceremonial; it is to recruit a Village Manager through a professional, merit-based process.

Village managers must be salaried professionals. They are responsible for coordinating service delivery, maintaining village infrastructure, collecting and reporting local data, and liaising with the district administration for education, health, water, sanitation, and roads. They are the institutional memory of the village. They ensure that boreholes do not fail silently, that schools are staffed, and that small problems are fixed before they become expensive crises.

Critically, village managers are not political actors. They do not campaign. They do not grandstand. They administer. Their accountability runs horizontally to the village council and vertically to the district. This separation of politics from administration is not a luxury; it is the difference between order and improvisation.

Town Managers and Town Councils

Towns require a higher level of legitimacy and authority. Each town should therefore elect a Town Manager, who works alongside an elected Town Council. Election confers democratic legitimacy. Clearly defined mandates confer accountability.

Town managers are responsible for delivering the full bundle of town-level services, managing town budgets and assets, coordinating with district executives, and overseeing infrastructure such as markets, clinics, roads, waste systems, and cultural facilities. Unlike the current system, where responsibility is diffused and no one is clearly in charge, this model makes failure visible and success measurable.

When a town’s waste system collapses or roads deteriorate, citizens should know exactly who is accountable. That clarity is the foundation of democratic control.

Cities, Mayors, and Integrated Municipal Governance

Cities require the highest level of coordination. Any settlement designated as a city must be governed as a contiguous, integrated municipality. Fragmentation is not decentralization; it is dysfunction.

Accra is the cautionary tale. Multiple municipalities, overlapping authorities, and competing interests have produced congestion, incoherent planning, and service failure. This arrangement serves political convenience, not urban reality, and it must be dismantled.

Every city must have an elected Mayor and a City Council, with council members representing clearly defined boroughs within a unified metropolitan structure. The Mayor is accountable for city-wide outcomes. Transport, sanitation, housing, land use, and public safety cannot be managed as patchwork projects. They require integrated authority.

Most importantly, we must abandon the habit of inventing customized governance arrangements for each city, each election cycle, or each political coalition. That habit is not creativity; it is disorganization masquerading as flexibility. Modern states do not endlessly reinvent their basic administrative units. They standardize them, professionalize them, and allow performance to compound over time.

If Ghana wants modernization, it must relearn an old lesson. Places do not govern themselves. They are governed by institutions, staffed by professionals, constrained by rules, and accountable to citizens. Without village managers, town managers, and elected city leadership operating within a coherent structure, every development plan will continue to dissolve into confusion.

Order is not imposed from above. It is managed from the ground up.

Recasting the District System: Coordination, Not Control

Now we can turn to the hard part, the part Ghana keeps avoiding because it threatens the habits of patronage that have become normal. How do we recast the district-based system so it supports modernization rather than reproducing disorder?

Start with a distinction that ought to be obvious, but in Ghana is routinely ignored. It is perfectly legitimate for a country to have an electoral map built around constituencies. That is how representative democracy aggregates votes. But an electoral map is not the same thing as a governing architecture. Constituencies exist to select MPs. Governing units exist to deliver services, plan infrastructure, and manage the daily mechanics of social order. Confusing the two is like confusing a campaign platform with a budget. One is political. The other is administrative.

Ghana’s current arrangement collapses this distinction. District assemblies are elected, but the chief executives who run them are imposed from the center through politics. That design is broken in exactly the way economists would predict. The district executive’s incentives point upward toward the presidency, not downward toward communities. When resources are scarce, loyalty competes with performance, and performance usually loses. Anyone who has spent time inside district administrations knows the practical outcome: constant stalemates, labor tensions, and a bureaucratic culture where local staff are asked to deliver outcomes without authority, predictable financing, or clear lines of accountability. The recurring stand-offs with district unions are not incidental drama; they are structural symptoms.

A modernization-oriented district system must be built on a different logic. Villages and towns are where people live. Village managers and town managers are therefore the only officials who can plausibly serve as the natural members of a district assembly. The district, in this model, is not the primary administrative unit. It is the coordinating unit. It exists to organize, align, and pool, not to dominate and micromanage.

This is what it means, concretely, to turn districts from political containers into functional coordinating institutions.

The District Assembly as a Coordinating Unit

Under a modernized architecture, the district’s central purpose is coordination across the villages and towns that actually constitute the local economy. Its role is to align planning, aggregate resources for infrastructure that requires scale, and coordinate services that cut across jurisdictions. Think shared roads, watershed management, secondary infrastructure, emergency response networks, and inter-town transport links.

This immediately corrects a major pathology of the current system. Today, budgets are concentrated at the district level while service realities exist at the village and town level. The result is that service delivery becomes a political negotiation. In a modernization model, budgets primarily live where outcomes are delivered. Villages and towns hold their own budgets to provide predefined amenities and services, and they are accountable both to residents and to each other through the coordinating structure of the district.

The district’s administrative staff should therefore be smaller and more technical. Its job is not to run every local function. Its job is to ensure standards, interoperability, and scale economies.

District Executive Leadership That Is Accountable Downward

The second reform is the hinge. Each district should be headed by a District Executive elected by the villages, towns, or qualified cities within that district.

This reverses incentives in the most important way possible. The district executive no longer serves at the pleasure of central political authority. He or she serves at the pleasure of the settlements whose daily life the district is supposed to coordinate. That does not merely improve legitimacy. It improves performance, because the executive’s survival depends on delivery, not on proximity to power.

It also reduces the chronic labor and administrative tensions that now plague district administrations. A district executive accountable downward has an incentive to bargain seriously with local staff and unions, because dysfunction becomes politically costly in the one place that matters: among residents.

Composition of the District Assembly: Real Places, Real Managers

In a functioning system, representation should follow the places where people actually live. The district assembly should therefore be composed of the officials responsible for delivering services in those places.

That means the district assembly is composed of all village managers, all town managers, and representatives from city councils where applicable. This is not a cosmetic change. It is a profound shift from abstract electoral areas to living jurisdictions. Decisions begin to reflect practical constraints, real service gaps, and the lived priorities of communities rather than parliamentary logic.

It also creates peer accountability. Town managers and village managers sit in the same coordinating body that sets shared plans and allocates pooled resources. If one jurisdiction consistently fails, that failure becomes visible to the others. If one jurisdiction is innovative, its practices can spread. This is how institutional learning scales.

Cities Must Be Governed as Integrated Economic Units

Finally, for cities, the governance logic must be even more stringent. A qualified city should have a city council elected from defined borough districts and a mayor elected city-wide. The mayor works with the city council to deliver the defined services and manage the city as a single economic unit.

This point matters because Ghana has treated city governance as negotiable, customized, and politically convenient. Accra is the poster child for what goes wrong when you fragment an urban economy into competing municipalities. Transport, sanitation, land use planning, housing, and public safety all become incoherent because authority is splintered. Modern cities cannot function as engines of productivity under that arrangement.

Standardization is therefore not bureaucracy; it is development policy. We need to stop inventing bespoke governance structures that merely mirror our habits of disorganization. Cities must have mayors. Cities must be integrated. Boroughs can exist for representation, but not as competing sovereigns.

The Path Forward: Modernizing Ghana’s Governance

The argument here is not that electoral constituencies are illegitimate. It is that they are irrelevant to service delivery. Constituencies choose MPs. Villages, towns, and cities deliver daily life. Districts, properly recast, coordinate those settlements so that standards can scale, infrastructure can connect, and budgets can be deployed with discipline.

This is how decentralisation becomes real. Authority sits where outcomes are delivered. Coordination sits where scale is required. Leadership is elected by the communities that bear the consequences. And the country gains something it has lacked for far too long: A governance architecture that is legible, repeatable, and capable of modernization.

Countries that modernize do so by making governance legible, repeatable, and scalable. Ghana’s current system makes repetition impossible. Every settlement negotiates its development anew. Politics fills the vacuum left by absent standards.

This architecture being proposed replaces negotiation with definition, discretion with standards, and chaos with order.

Modernization does not begin with megaprojects. It begins with villages that work, towns that function, and cities that scale. Get that right, and everything else follows.

The Elephant in the Room: Transforming Chieftaincy for Modernization

Finally, there is, of course, a large elephant in the room that cannot be avoided in any serious discussion of governance and modernization in Ghana. What do we do with chieftaincy, with overlapping traditional authorities, with unresolved disputes over towns and villages, and with customary systems that predate the modern state but now sit awkwardly within it?

This is not a marginal issue; it is central. Land, identity, authority, and legitimacy all pass through traditional systems in Ghana. Any attempt to reorganize villages, towns, cities, and districts without confronting this reality would be intellectually dishonest and politically naïve.

That is why this question deserves its own treatment, which will be taken up next week. But it is important to be clear, and blunt, about the direction of travel.

If Ghana is still holding onto chieftaincy across the country in its current form fifty years from now, it will almost certainly be subordinated economically and politically by societies that have modernized their systems of authority. That is not an attack on culture; it is an observation about history. No country has achieved sustained modernization while leaving parallel systems of power, land control, and dispute resolution unresolved and in competition with the state.

Modernization does not require the erasure of tradition. But it does require its transformation. Traditional authority cannot remain simultaneously cultural, judicial, political, and economic while the state attempts to build a coherent system of law, planning, taxation, and service delivery. That contradiction cannot be managed indefinitely. It eventually breaks one way or the other.

The choice, then, is not whether Ghana modernizes its traditional systems. The choice is whether we do so deliberately, thoughtfully, and on our own terms, or whether we allow external economic pressures and internal dysfunction to render those systems irrelevant in the harshest possible way.

That is the conversation ahead. And it is one Ghana can no longer postpone.