Senior law lecturer at the Ghana School of Law, Moses Foh-Amoaning has blamed the brouhaha surrounding the list of presidential staffers released by the President on the poor management skills of the communications directorate at the presidency.
Speaking on Metro TV’s Good Evening Ghana program, Mr. Foh-Amoaning said there should have been adequate planning done prior to the release to ensure that the details were clear to avoid doubts and inconsistencies.
Considering the fact that the NPP massively criticized the previous government over a similar release while in opposition he noted, they should have been more organized with enough clarity on the vital areas to avoid the outpour and outrage it generated.
“How has the government communication outfit dealt with the whole matter? Because this has happened before and so when the communications director was submitting to parliament the list of people who work at the office of government machinery which is the presidency, he should have known that it would cause a bit of an uproar so what were the details in terms of specifying even the timing or the choice of when to release the information could have been managed”
“Parliament is on recess so it’s a matter of how you manage the information….Certainly you should have made those distinctions, the number, presidential staffers, ministers and those that you inherited, that should have been made clear so that everybody will see that it wasn’t just a thousand thrown out there”
“Don’t forget that the president and his party when they were in opposition were quite vociferous about what was happening in the previous government when the numbers were churned out. Clearly that’s why I’m talking about how to manage the whole thing because you are doing something which in the past you had looked at with a different eye so if you were going to make noise were you prepared? I don’t think the management was well done”, he told host Paul Adom Otchere.
Mr. Foh-Amoaning believes that very few persons can be used to achieve great results.
Efficiency in his view is much more than just productivity, it is more about utilizing very few persons to produce greater results.
“I think that people say that efficiency has to do with numbers, it’s the first time I’m hearing this in sides because efficiency is more about the work you want to do than the number of people you want to achieve with it, so you can achieve a lot with very few people, that’s efficiency”, he said on Metro TV’s Good Evening Ghana show.
His comments come on the back of recent outpours following the release of a report on the staffing position of the Office of the President revealing some 998 staff currently working at the seat of government.
The revelation made in accordance with Section 11 of the Presidential Office Act, 1993 (Act 463) which requires the President to submit a report on the staffing position of the Office of the President annually was met with mixed reactions from the public, majority of Ghanaians expressing worry over the implications of the figure on the public purse.
While critics have accused government of failing on its promises to protect the public purse with the huge numbers it has implored under its government, some government officials in defense have maintained that the number though high is having less effect on the public purse compared to the 678 figure under the Mahama administration.
