GIMPA Council meets tomorrow over impasse

The governing Council of the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration (GIMPA) is meeting tomorrow Friday, 8th July, 2016, to deliberate on the impasses between the staff and faculty, and the Chairman of the Council, Dr Christiana Amoako-Nuama.

Staff and faculty GIMPA passed a vote of no confidence in the governing Council last Tuesday, and insisted that the Council should be dissolved immediately.

They claimed the chair of the Council, Dr Christiana Amoako-Nuama, a former Minister of Education, lacks the competence and integrity to lead the institute to higher heights. Speaking on Onua FM’s Yen Sempa Thursday, the President of the GIMPA Alumini and a member of the Council, Norman Yemetey Tetteh explained that the Council has been served with the letter and they are to meet over the issue to deliberate on it.

Below is the resolution by the staff and faculty after their meeting last Tuesday:

Dear Mr. President,

PETITION TO DISSOLVE THE COUNCIL OF THE GHANA INSTITUTE OF MANAGEMENT AND PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION (GIMPA)

On behalf of staff and faculty of GIMPA, we submit this letter to your high office to express our loss of confidence in the GIMPA Council, and to call for its immediate dissolution to allow the Institute to recover from its steep decline in quality of student services and general academic work.

For the seven years that the current chair of Council, Dr. Christina Amoako-Nuama has been in charge of the Council, she persistently placed personal interest ahead of the Institute’s interest, interfered in day-to-day administrative duties, and engaged in gross dissipation of the Institute’s financial resources as explained below.

Consequently, the Council failed woefully in performing the duties ascribed to it in the GIMPA ACT. In brief, the chair lacks the integrity required of a person occupying the respectable position she occupies.

To stem the decline in GIMPA’s reputation across the country and sub-region, staff and faculty passed a vote of no confidence in the Council on Tuesday 5th July 2016. Details of the vote results are attached. The following list of recent Council misconducts forms the foundation of the reported No-Confidence-Vote: 1. For the past four years, GIMPA operated without a substantive Registrar.

After setting up and financing search committees to recruit a competent person to fill the position of Registrar. The Council rejected the recommended candidate paving the way for Council to bring in persons through the back door to take up the job in Acting capacity. In February 2016, the Council set-up another search committee to recruit a Registrar for the school. The Committee presented its recommendations to Council in April 2016.

Council as a body initially accepted the recommendation (although the chair disagreed with the choice), and sent a three-member team made up of Mrs Bridgette Katsriku (Head of Public Services Commission), Nana Kwasi Agyekum-Dwamena (Head of Civil Service), and Dr. Christina Amoako-Nuama to meet with the recommended candidate, Mr Julius Atikpui to congratulate him and make him an oral offer.

The said meeting was held on 14th June 2016. Unfortunately, Dr. Christina Amoako-Nuama failed to turn-up for the meeting leaving the other two members of the team to meet Mr Atikpui. Dr. Christina Amoako-Nuama later refused to issue the appointment letter to Mr Julius Atikpui. Instead, she started lobbying other Council members to reject the candidate. She then called another council meeting requesting for a second vote on an issue that had already been resolved in Council.

The votes were split with five (5) votes going for the candidate and five (5) going against him. This left the issue unresolved to date. Council set-up another search committee in February 2016 to recruit a person to fill the position of Rector which becomes vacant in September 2016. The search committee submitted its report to Council in June 2016. Council has as at Tuesday 5th July 2016 not taken a decision on the recommended candidate.

Reliable information available to staff and faculty indicates that the Council chair labelled the recommended candidate a litigant and unsuitable for the position. Considering that these search committees require substantial financial resources to complete such searches, failure to provide acceptable reasons for rejecting their recommendations amount to wanton dissipation of GIMPA’s financial resources.

Thus far, hundreds of thousands of Ghana Cedis have already been spent by these two search committees. The Council committed GIMPA to purchase 1000 acres of land from the Nsawam area for a colossal amount of 24 million cedis from the management of KOANS Estates under very unfavourable terms to GIMPA.

The land is overpriced for land in that part of the country and was given to GIMPA on a 40 year lease. This works out to about 6000 Ghana cedis per plot of land for a 40-year lease. Interestingly, members of the GIMPA senior members association purchased plots of land from the same vendor in the area for 3000 cedis per plot on 99-year leases during the same period that the 1000 acres was acquired.

It took the intervention of lawyers of the Institute to change the 40-year lease to GIMPA to a 99-year lease at an extra cost to GIMPA. The chair of Council, Dr Christina Amoako-Nuamah has a pet project on campus which involves the construction of an Auditorium. The chair unlawfully imposed the contractor for the project on the Institute.

Unfortunately, this project, which was initially estimated to cost 2.5 million Ghana Cedis has already cost GIMPA close to 8 million Ghana Cedis but remains uncompleted. 5. Dr Christina Amoako-Nuamah interferes unduly in many administrative issues in GIMPA even to the point of determining which office some administrative assistants of the Institute should be posted.

Dr Christina Amoako-Nuamah cancelled several GIMPA programs including launching of the GIMPA law school Moot Court in … 2016 because she was no consulted in scheduling the program. This cancellation caused substantial embarrassment to GIMPA since it came just 2 hours before the program was scheduled to begin.

iii. Dr Christina Amoako-Nuamah also dissolved the Business School Advisory Board soon after it was out-doored claiming she was not consulted. From the foregoing and taking cognisance of GIMPA’s position as a leading institute in leadership we respectfully appeal to you to dissolve the current council as a matter of urgency.

This would pave the way for the formation of a new council that understand the challenges of GIMPA and its role in the socio-economic development of Ghana.

Signed:

President, GIMPA Senior Members Association

President,GIMPA Middle Level Members Association

President, GIMPA Junior Members Association