Government will definitely recruit environmental health officer - Dr Arthur

Dr Nana Ato Arthur, Head of the Office of Local Government Service (OHLGS), said Government would not allow Environmental Health Officers to sit at home while their services were needed at the various Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies (MMDA’s).

He, therefore, assured graduates of the School of Hygiene who have been sitting at home awaiting recruitment to exercise restraint as the office sought financial clearance to recruit them.

Dr Ato Arthur made this known to the Ghana News Agency in an interview after speaking to some 500 graduate students who picketed his office Thursday in Accra to demand posting.

He said Government was conscious of the fact that sanitation was key as part of its policy, thus required the service of the environmental health officers to complement the efforts of government to make the country clean.

Dr Ato Arthur said his outfit secure financial clearance to recruit 1,049 personnel in the various fields for which 23,000 applications were received and that his office divided the vacancies to all the fields that required personnel, adding that, “the OHLGS needed to recruit human resources personnel, caterers, procurement officers, environmental officers, engineers, among others.”

He said the MMDAs needed various classes of manpower and that only 100 environmental health officers were to be recruited out of the 1,049 and which 1,271 of them applied and 250 shortlisted for interview.

Dr Ato Arthur said the recruitment of the 100 would be done in alphabetical order and random sampling of candidates, who will be recruited to start work by April 2, 2018.

“The OHLGS has again submitted a letter to the Ministry of Finance for financial clearance to recruit about 4,000 staffs in various classes of manpower depending on what government budget will allow for.

He said within the government budgetary constraints, the service needed finance officers, budget officers, engineers, central administrators, statisticians to also provide us with reliable data to work with.

“We can’t only give all the recruitment slots to environmental health officers alone.