Francis Kwabena Ankomah, the District Chief Executive said the move was to make the markets attractive to the numerous traders who do business outside the market and therefore, difficult to get them to pay levies or tolls.

He said the expansion works on the markets would involve upgrading of the stalls to complete lockable shops, including lorry parks, concrete pavement of the floor and provision of other modern facilities such as toilet, water and electricity adding that “all these are geared towards making our markets attractive”.

Mr Ankomah, who made this known in an interview with Ghanadistricts.com, noted that the town constituted the central business heart in the district, yet, because of the poor condition of the markets, the assembly could not collect the estimated revenue from the markets.

He said all the satellite markets in the small towns and villages would have a facelift to complement the major ones to ensure a holistic approach in tackling all the assembly’s revenue targets.

The DCE said the move, apart from improving revenue generation for the Assembly, was also to ensure a better and clean environment for traders to be able to compete with other trading platforms such as marts and supermarkets which were fast emerging.

The DCE indicated that the Assembly had considered the privatization of its revenue collection in the areas of property rates, tolls, ticketing and other levies as a strategy to cover the huge deficits in the revenue collection by using well captured information of all property.

He said based on planned estimates, with proper revenue collection management and systems, the Assembly could stand on the strength of its IGF to provide developmental projects for people and appealed to stakeholders to support it in that agenda.