With 5 Months To Elections Allow Agency Heads To Run Public Institutions

With five months into the presidential and parliamentary elections, a management productivity consultant, Mr Osei Antoh, has proposed that chief directors, heads of public agencies and technocrats be given the responsibility of running the public institutions to prevent government business from stalling.

He said in an era of mobile telephony, there had to be no fetish about the delegation of power to such agency heads, as communication was easy and they could communicate regularly on any particular issue with their political heads who would be campaigning in their constituencies.

Election periods are characterised by the abandoning of ministries, departments and agencies by political heads for their constituencies, leaving government business at a standstill.

He said such measures, if not taken, would stall the country’s development, as development initiatives and policies could not wait until the elections were over.

Mr Antoh, the Director of Consultancy at the Management Productivity Institute (MDPI), said this in an interview with graphic.com.gh in Accra on the challenge of productivity of the public sector in an election year.

With the public sector workers, he was of the view that they ought not to take a French Leave with the absence of their political heads, but had to be kept in check by heads of public institutions for work to go on.

He said the assumption was that political heads of public agencies had staff dedicated to their political activities, therefore staff of the public agency over who they superintended could not accompany them on their campaign tours at the expense of their jobs.

Mr Antoh also proposed an assessment of the productivity of politicians by citizens as a yardstick in qualifying them for an election or a re-election.

He said the country needed baseline studies on all sectors of the country so that politicians would be benchmarked to justify their election bids.

Thus when a politician assumed office, citizens would know what had been achieved at the time he or she came in and the person’s productive initiative subsequent to assuming office.

He said this would ensure a consciousness that affected the whole social fabric for the good of all citizens.

Mr Antoh also suggested laws to enjoin politicians to use social services such as educational facilities for them to have no choice but ensure standards in social services.

He said if these were not pushed for by the citizenry, social services would continue to be poor.