Governance in Ghana is not about thinking anymore - Tony Aidoo

Head of Policy Monitoring and Evaluation at the Presidency, Dr. Tony Aidoo, says governance in the country had degenerated to such low levels that government actions and decisions were no longer underpinned by well-reasoned ideas.

He said for a very long time now, the political elite and the technocrats in Ghana had shirked their responsibility to formulate and implement well-thought-out policies to address the economic and social problems of the country.

“Governance is not about thinking anymore; governance in this country for a very long time does not involve people sitting and going to sleep and thinking; [they] don’t think!

Dr Aidoo was contributing to a discussion on the political, social and economic situation in the country on Joy FM’s Super Morning Show Wednesday.

“I believe that there is an imperative need for us to redefine the democratic principles by which we want this country to be governed and the processes by which we want to achieve growth and development,” he asserted.

Dr. Tony Aidoo dismissed suggestions that successive governments had formulated good policies, even if their implementation had always remained a challenge.

“A policy is a [good] policy where you have taken account of the objectives of the policy; the constraints that may affect the policy; the solutions to the constraints, and when you can put all these down on paper, you have a policy,” he said.

With the current situation, the Head of government policy monitoring said, “We don’t have policies because the policies are formulated without thought to the constraints, and how to overcome those constraints.”

When the vice-president of Policy think tank, IMANI-Ghana, Kofi Bentil, reminded him that he was in charge of policy monitoring and evaluation at the presidency and ought not to be heard lamenting the way he did, the former Deputy Interior Minister retorted, “But who listens to me”?

In what he called candid comments, Dr. Tony Aidoo, who recently complained that his office had virtually been rendered redundant since the death the late President John Mills said, “It is about time that we allowed a little bit of candour [in our politics].”

He said the current practice where policies are initiated and abandoned midway because they were not well-thought through at the embryonic stages must cease.