Deputy Minister of Energy Fired?

The Weekly Standard can authoritatively reveal today that Deputy Minister of Energy, K. T. Hammond, has been booted out of the Energy Ministry with immediate effect.

Foul-mouth K. T. Hammond is however saved from suffering the ignominy of having to exit from the government altogether by virtue of the fact that President Kufuor is having some real difficulty in finding competent persons to take up appointments in his government.

Thus saved, K. T. Hammond is most likely going to up at the Health Ministry where he would deputise Maj (rtd) Courage Quarshigah.

Credible information available to the Weekly Standard indicate that K. T. Hammond’s dismissal from the government was precipitated by his boss, Joseph Kofi Addah, who, in trying to save himself from being axed from his position as the Energy Minister, made a very strong case to President Kufuor that if anyone needed to be sacked then it ought to be K. T. Hammond.

Kofi Addah’s case, we have learnt, was quite simply that he had barely been a year old at the Ministry before the energy crisis erupted and that K. T. Hammond who had been in the Ministry as a deputy Minister for the last three years ought to have been better informed about such matters so as to brief any new Minister posted to the Ministry.

According to our sources, K. T. Hammond himself did not help matters very much when in discussions with some of his colleagues over the energy crisis, he displayed gross incompetence as he was unable to differentiate between kilowatt hour and megawatt hour.

"These things get around, and the President eventually gets to hear these display of ignorance. But when it gets to the point that the man himself has virtually thrown in the towel and he is now depending solely on God for solutions to the problem then obviously he must make way for some a fresh mind to come and find solution to the problem," a highly placed source at the Castle told the Weekly Standard.

It would be recalled that our sister paper, The Ghanaian Lens yesterday reported that K. T. Hammond is now blaming God for the NPP’s inability to find solutions to the energy crisis.

In an interview with Joy FM’s Israel Laryea, K. T. Hammond made it clear that the NPP has been unable to find solutions to the crisis because God has not been favourably disposed to the proposals that they have come up with to solve the energy crisis.

It is not known whether K. T. Hammond believes that God would be favourably disposed to whatever plans he may come up with in the Health Ministry, where he is headed, to solve the numerous problems in that ministry.