998 Staffers: 'Governance not about appointments' – Gyampo

A professor of Political Science at the University of Ghana, Yaw Ransford Gyampo, has taken a stance against the 998 staffers at the seat of government, Jubilee House.

According to him, the appointment of so many people at the presidency, is an attempt by the government to create a parallel civil service that will result in waste.

His comment comes on the heels of some public backlash that greeted the disclosure of the number of employees at the presidency by the president to parliament last week in compliance with Section 11 of the Presidential Office Act, 1993 (Act 463), which requires him to submit annually to the house, a report on the staffing position of the Office of the President.

Sharing his thoughts on the subject on the Executive Breakfast Show (EBS) on Class91.3FM on Monday, 23 April 2018, Professor Gyampo linked it to a systemic problem created by politicians.

He told show host Moro Awudu that: “Anytime government comes, it tries to pack its own people into the civil service and the administrative machinery of the state sometimes without recourse to meritocracy.

“Whether they qualify or they don’t qualify, ‘It is our government that has come’, but governance is not about appointing people into job positions, it’s about creating opportunities for people to thrive on their own, so, you don’t help the cause of governance and development when you think that: ‘It is my time and my people must find jobs, so, I‘ll appoint them and all that.’

“There is a way to govern that creates opportunity for all, so all can find something doing for themselves without government. So, leaders should be thinking of rolling back the frontiers of the state, leaders should be thinking about empowering their people to find jobs themselves and not to be relying on government, otherwise, then we’ll continue to make or weaken the civil service through the kinds of things we do.

“At the end of the day, they will be there, they will have no work doing and we’ll just be paying them because nobody will have the balls and the muscle to be able to say: ‘I’m asking you all to go because you are redundant’”.

Prof Gyampo also called on Nana Akufo-Addo to initiate a reshuffle that will see to a cut in the size of the numbers.