Malfunctioning GPS: The Ghana Police Service recruitment process needs reforms - (Part 2)

At a duty point one fateful day, a junior at the university who read for a Bachelor’s degree in Education visited and told me he had been selected into the Ghana Police Service using his bachelor’s degree. “I will be going for training soon,” he said excitedly. I had used a double application strategy, seeking entry via both my secondary school as well as bachelor’s degree credentials, and gained entry via the former.

Six months down the line, my university friend, two years my junior, graduated from the Police Training School and was given the rank of sergeant. I was still a lance corporal after six years in the service. It will take me 16 years to become a sergeant just because I was recruited with a senior high school certificate. It doesn’t matter that I hold a diploma, a bachelor’s degree, and even a master’s in security.

All these documents are on the police official records. The following year, my friend was promoted to the rank of Inspector, then to Chief Inspector pending college the subsequent year. He holds just a bachelor’s degree in education and will become a senior officer in less than four years in the service. Meanwhile, I will remain a junior officer for not less than 25 years and be my friend's subordinate forever. It will take me 25 odd years to qualify for entrance to college while it is taking him less than four years, even though my qualification is not inferior to his. All this in spite of the fact that I have more years of working experience than him. Now the question I keep asking myself is: “Where have I gone wrong, and what was the basis for which these recruitments were conducted?”

I know it is a well-established and accepted practice globally that organisations seeking recruitment first check their current staff to see if there are some candidates within the organisation who are equally qualified to occupy such positions, aka internal recruitment. When internally, there are no suitable candidates, then an external advertisement for new entrants is made. It is well established that internal recruitment within the services is beneficial for the following reasons:

1. Serving officers already understand the service culture, values, and procedures. This can result in smoother transitions and better performance in the new roles.

2. Offering promotional opportunities to existing staff can boost morale and motivate workers. This shows that the organisation values and invests in staff career growth.

3. Serving staff typically require less training and can hit the ground running, thereby making the recruitment process faster and more efficient.

4. Since the organisation/service already has a track record of staff performance, risks associated with hiring unknown external candidates are minimised.

The current Inspector General of Police (IGP), for example, to the best of my knowledge, benefited from similar opportunities in the past. This contributed to his moving up the corporate ladder from the constable rank to the enviable rank of Commissioner of Police (COP). So if such provisions were made in the past and such officers performed with distinction, why has that corporate culture been abandoned now? Why is the Ghana Police Service virtually the only institution in Ghana still practising such an obnoxious corporate recruitment policy?

What traditions are we keeping with such a retrogressive regulation that does not recognize the efforts of the junior ranks who aspire to serve the country in higher portfolios?

I question the system because it is widely known that a significant number of applicants who eventually joined the Ghana Police Service with senior high school certificates are from poor and vulnerable homes. Such persons have virtually no connections to the movers and shakers in the Ghanaian body politic.

And yes, because such persons have nobody to lobby for them, the provisions in the Service Instructions which require reward for loyalty are not being seriously adhered to even in the face of numerous cries from lowly ranked officers. In other words, the Service Instructions are outliving their usefulness. The Service Instruction states that any personnel who acquires any higher academic qualifications shall not be promoted based on it.

If personnel will not be promoted on account of their degrees, why will you employ an outsider with just a bachelor’s degree but without any experience to command your own staff, many of whom have both experience and higher degrees than the new entrant officers?

Since joining the service almost eight years ago, some of my mates from the same training school, facing similar predicaments and seeing that there are no internal opportunities for advancement, have left the service in search of better prospects. The situation is so bad to the extent that some who were even sent to South Africa by the service for further training for years still left the service upon returning to Ghana. This way, the service loses valuable institutional knowledge that will take long to rebuild.

This obnoxious corporate practice also creates resentment and friction between the serving officers and the new entrant officers most often. And sometimes this harms collaboration during duties and operations.

These bad human resource practices also erode trust and loyalty of other officers toward the service, thus making officers feel undervalued, unappreciated, and demoralised.

It is for these reasons that I am publicly writing and pleading with the current administration headed by the renowned COP Dr. Akuffo Dampare to review the burning issue of internal recruitment and serving officers with higher educational qualifications as part of his transformational agenda. This will reduce the current inordinate brain drain in the Ghana Police Service. What is more, addressing the bad corporate practice extensively discussed here will surely make the Ghana Police Service more lively and worth dying for, won’t it?