Ghana Government Official Complementary Cards; A Credibility Issue

The Government of Ghana (GoG) is telling the Ghanaian story to potential investors in Europe and abroad to woo investors into the country. This is through several channels comprising high-powered delegation of ministers of state and various government officials sent abroad.

There are meetings between the several delegates and the exchange of official complementary cards. It has been revealed that some official GoG business cards of delegates include emails such as “@yahoo.co.uk”. This email address may be the single email, or it is together with Ghana government official email.

The inclusion of such emails or personal emails in official business cards brings out the following questions and created impression;

• Is Ghana still under colonial rule?
• Indication of tendency to commit corruption
• The GoG institution is unprofessional
• The GoG institution has credibility issues

Now the question is, why does the Ghana Government complementary card contain personal emails of the individual holder? We will further justify this question through the following discussion and argumentation.

First let's give a brief understanding of, what is a business or complementary card? Business cards are cards bearing business information about a company, individual or institution. Many people including the GoG overlook the value of having a professional business card that accurately reflects a brand image, yet this small piece of paper can be an important part when wooing investors. It is often the first item investors receive from a negotiating partner, so it is the first opportunity to make a strong, positive impression.

In a recent visit by a Ghanaian high profile delegate to Finland, ministers handed out the following business cards to counterparts. Please observe the emails in red boxes.

These are two dissimilar cards from the same Ghana government ministry handed out at the same venue. Now, the main issue here is to do with one of the outstanding ethical issues involving official complimentary cards. Among the 5 common mistakes in business card design is no email address or bad email.

Amazingly, we identify from the two cards the nice GoG logo and ministry name. However upon further observation of the card you will identify one card has a single email address “@yahoo.com.” quite fortunately, the other has an official Ghana government email address “@moti.gov.gh” in addition to a yahoo.co.uk email address.

This revelation prompted us to further study previous Ministerial cards and to compare with the host country, Finland's ministerial cards. We observed all the cards in our possession contain, I may say email addresses of the ministers.

This was quite shocking but we thought it was a norm in Ghana. Therefore, we compared GoG-business cards with some selected local company cards and there were no private emails on company business cards as observed in the picture below.

First of all the format of a Ghana government complementary card should be uniform for all government officials. Second there is no justification for a state worker to put his or her private mail address. This brings out very serious credibility and transparency issues on the part of the government. Who is to be blamed for this blunder?

The issue is that, anyone working with a company or institution cannot under any circumstance put personal emails on a company business card. State workers can have personal business cards separate and can be given out in unofficial circumstances. In this technological age most businesses are conducted electronically through mails. Therefore, official documents may go to private mails

There is the impression that both the officials and the issuers do not see the essence of emails and the type of messages they carry across in the business community. We should educate ourselves on such trivial matters and especially government officials should be more knowledgeable in this modern world. The disregard for many things such as this tells why serious nations do not recognize our seriousness.

However, the question still remains, “what are the intentions of the holders of such cards or in this sense, what are the intentions of the Ghana Government?” Is it pure ignorance? Conspiring to engage in corruption by avoiding transparency or is it lack of professionalism? Ghanaians will like to know the intention behind private mails on state complimentary cards and if it will be remedied.

NPP-Finland Branch
Communication Team
+233451856393
+358445705170