Maybe the time has come for Presidents to either appoint a Chief of Staff who is deeply interested in policy, with an intimate understanding of how political vision gets translated into reality by the clunky machinery of government, and thereby capable of actually coordinating the delivery of the Governments program, or simply elevate the position of Cabinet Secretary so that holders of that title can play this critical role. Looking at previous Chiefs of Staff reveal a pattern. Nana Ato Dadzie was a Lawyer. Jake Otanka Obetsebi-Lamptey was an advertiser. Kwadwo Mpiani was a banker. John Martey Newman was a corporate executive. And Prosper Bani is a peacemaking specialist. None of them in the decade preceding their appointment spent any significant time involved in the policy critique space in Ghana. This is perhaps why in recent times Presidents have tended to build advisory structures to take care of the policy bit. So President Kufuor had Chinery-Hesse. President Mills had his kitchen cabinet. And President Mahama has Sulley Gariba. This splitting of general administration and policy coordination seems neat in principle, but in practice it has been quite unwieldy, with the result that policymaking comes across as incoherent and disorganised. For example, chemicals are procured for pest control whilst trained sprayer-gangs are disbanded for lack of funds. So why not prioritise certain areas of the country and buy fewer chemicals so that sprayers can be hired? We under-invest in curriculum development (the secondary school curricular development project has seen almost no investment in a decade) but spend money buying laptops for distribution to students, with zero educational content pre-installed. We subsidise premix fuel and borrow to build fishing harbours but neither invest in fisheries management or assist fishermen to upgrade their equipment and change the nets they use, terrible nets that lead to overharvesting of fingerlings and thereby the collapse of our most economically valuable fish stocks. And on and on and on. SMH.
Posted on: Sun, 13 Jul 2014 16:11:27 +0000
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