Government asked to appoint government statistician

Mr Stephen Adjei, Chief Statistician of the Ghana Statistical Services (GSS), on Saturday appealed to the government to appoint a substantive government statistician to enable the service to operate effectively.

He noted that for the past four years the service has been without a government statistician, resulting in a host of problems, including the exodus of professionals from the service.

Mr Adjei, who made the appeal at the launch in Accra of a new information and communications technology (ICT), also said work at GSS was suffering because of the absence of a board of directors and appealed to the authorities to appoint one soon.

Bulaiza Limited Company developed the resident information system (RIS), an innovative database for storing information on the computer.

Mr Adjei said an accurate statistical data was required for national development, adding that recent calls for the creation of new districts should be backed by up-to-date data to ensure sound social, economic and political planning.

He said the lack of this information partly explained why the district assembly common fund could not be shared equally among the districts.

Mr Modestus Atidigah, Executive Manager of Bulaiza limited, said automatic tax defaulting tracking, crime prevention, elimination of ghost names from the pay roll were some of the benefits for using the RIS.

He said government agencies, including the police service, would not pay for operating the system but they would be required to pay for the cost of training their personnel to handle the facility, whose software alone cost 1.9 million US dollars.

In a speech read for him, Mr Albert Kan-Dapaah, Minister of Communications and Technology, commended the company for coming up with such an innovation, which would assist in checking corruption.

He said the government was committed on harnessing the benefits of ICT and making Ghana the hub of technology in the West African sub-region.

The RIS is designed for international use: a wide range of governmental, industrial and commercial use and offers instant access to information.