Big Shake-Up In Civil Service

....PAYROLL BLOATED BY 220,000
Government has just completed the first phase of a comprehensive study of the public service, the results of which will lead to the redefinition of the missions of all public institutions, their structures and skills requirement, with the view to make them more relevant. The findings do not only confirm that the public sector is in many areas woefully unproductive, unskilled and overstaffed, but also that the payroll is far larger than the real individuals earning incomes.

According to the Co-ordinator of the National Institutional Renewal Programme, Dr K. Appiah-Koranteng, “the perception that the public sector is over-bloated is real”. For example, as at the year 2000, there were a total of 538,866 people in the public sector. This figure has been found to be more than 200,000 above the actual number of individuals that are entitled to draw their salaries from the Consolidated Fund.


Last year, President Kufuor tasked the NIRP to undertake, among other things, a censorship of the actual workforce as part of the entire reform exercise of the public sector. It took the NIRP six months to complete the exercise, which culminated in a two-week field exercise of head-to-head counting nationwide, which revealed that the payrolls had been bloated by more than 200,000 ‘ghost’ employees.

The NIRP is currently right-sizing the payroll. Dr Appiah-Koranteng said his team would be going back to the field next week for a three-week exercise to get the various heads of Ministries, Departments and Agencies to attest to the revised payroll list.