LGS crafts management policy to guide recruitment of personnel

Sogakope (V/R), July 9, GNA - Human Resource practitioners drawn from the Ministries, Departments and Agencies on Thursday began a three-day workshop to craft a Management Policy (HRMP) for the Local Government Service (LGS) to guide recruitment, promotion, motivation, transfer and retraining for personnel. The policy is also to re-engineer as well as optimize the potentials and capabilities of human resources of the LGS to ensure efficiency in the implementation of projects and cut down on unnecessary expenditure.

It will also rationalize the allocation of LGS human resources in a decentralized manner to ensure the availability of quality staff at local levels to undertake the responsibilities assigned them for the benefit of the people at the grassroots.

Mr Joseph Yieleh Chireh, Minister of Local Government and Rural Development, said the workshop at Sogakope in the Volta Region charged the participants to expedite action, as well as come out with a comprehensive policy to put to rest cases of high attrition rate associated with the public service.

Mr Chireh said currently due to the non-existence of the policy, so many people were hired without job references, most of whom had virtually become hangers-on, especially in Accra, but were drawing salaries and thereby putting strain on government's meagre resources. He said to ensure effective decentralization of government machinery, there was the need for strong, reliable and requisite human resource to assume the administration of programmes at the local levels. Mr Chireh said human resource was the largest and most valuable asset for a successful and efficient decentralized system adding that everything must be done to retain and attract high quality human resource to ensure its success.

He said a lot of people had applied and continued to apply for jobs in the service but because of the non-availability of the policy, it became difficult to hire and grade such applicants. The Minister hinted that recruitments would no longer take place when there was no specific job vacancy adding that when it became obvious to hire, those to be hired must be made aware of their job references.

Mr Joe Issachar, Head of Civil Service, said his outfit had begun collecting data from MDAs on staffing and age, among others, to guide the management of issues concerning civil servants. Mr Issachar said the service had started reviewing its Human Resource Policy on performance assessment, salary and other welfare packages to rectify the anomaly within the system to be able to deal with challenges confronting civil servants. 9 July 09