Remuneration package of public servants to be reviewed

A policy framework on public sector pay reforms, which seeks to provide adequate and competitive compensation to attract and retain the requisite human resource to enhance productivity for national development, has been placed before Cabinet.

Vice President Aliu Mahama, who announced this in Accra on Wednesday, said the reforms also aimed at motivating and influencing the attitude and habits of employees toward discipline, transparency and accountability. He was speaking at the inauguration of Human Resource Management (HRM) and the Private Partnership Co-ordinating (PPC) Committees under the National Institutional Renewal Programme (NIRP) at the Castle, Osu.

The HRM Committee, with Mr Emmanuel A. Sai as chairman, would oversee the implementation of a new Comprehensive Human Resource Management System, aimed at turning the public service into a learning organisation capable of meeting changing management demands. Vice President Mahama, therefore, tasked the members to, "run a merit-based national public system," saying, "this necessitates that we all take another look at our recruitment; promotion; appraisal and separation policies."

He said their responsibility required the setting of standards to commit managers to performance targets; training of public servants to equip them with competitive skills and redistributing authority, responsibility and resources to foster decentralisation. The Committee should redefine the role of the public sector manager in the context of accountability, transparency and rendering of customer service, he said.

To the PPC Committee, Vice President Mahama said, they should work toward increasing the participation of the private in the formulation of policies and their implementation and facilitate the co-ordination of the sectors to achieve the Golden Age of Business. Mr Kwamena Bartels, Minister for Private Sector Development, is chairman of the 12-member PPC committee.

Vice President Mahama said: "If one considered the enormous capacity that existed in the private sector and the fact that the public sector required these input for policy formulation, then one should begin to understand the degree of disservice that we were all doing to our dear country." He urged them to use the strategic plans developed by the NIRP to make decisions from private-public dialogue, enforceable, traceable and monitorable and expand public-private partnership at the district level.

Mr Bartels said strengthening public-private sector partnership at the district level would increase the efficiency of district assemblies and improve their revenue. He gave an example of a district assembly that engaged a private company to run its market, saying at the end of the first year, the assembly's revenue from the market increased by 300 per cent.

Mr Bartels said district assemblies should use the private sector in waste management and in the provision of water and roads under the concept of build operate and transfer (BOT). Mr Sai emphasised the training of public servants, saying the performance of the government would be determined by the quality of the human resource in the sector.

Dr Appiah Koranteng, National Co-ordinator of NIRP, said the commitment of members of the committees, were required to achieve the goals of the reforms.

He gave the assurance that NIRP would provide them with the technical support and logistics to make them efficient.