CIAG cautions fake practitioners

Sunyani (B/A) April 8 (Stevenson) GNA - Dr. Seth Buatsi, National President of Chartered Institute of Administrators of Ghana (CIAG) has cautioned that it is illegal for any person or corporate entity to practise administration and management consultancy services in the country without the certification and registration by the Institute.

He was addressing participants at the inauguration of Brong-Ahafo Regional Branch of the Association in Sunyani on Thursday. Mr. Buatsi said the Institute was legally registered as a professional association to charter and regulate professional administrators and consultants in October 2001.

It was the only professional body in Ghana recognized by the Professional Bodies Regulation Decree Law, 1973 NRCD 43 to examine, license and regulate the practice of professional administration and consultancy practice, he added.

The authorisation, the Institute's President explained, was done through the CIAG's general professional examination programmes, the pre-experience qualifying diploma programme, the post-experience qualifying diploma programme and mandatory continuous education programmes.

Mr. Buatsi added that as a way of ensuring the proper placement of members of the Institute, "we have established equivalencies with other professional examinations and we are also working very closely with employers of labour including the Ghana Education Service (GES) to ensure proper placement of persons who pass different levels of our examinations and with certification."

Mr. Buatsi said as part of the Institute's efforts to internationalise its activities and promote the marketability of members, it had planned a second international conference jointly with the IPMA-UK and Paris Graduate School of Management in collaboration with Ghana Employers Association and Association of Ghana Industries on June 3, this year at the Ghana Trade Fair Complex in Accra.

The CIAG President said the stakes were very high hence there was the urgent need for the administrators to position themselves through membership to secure their future as professional administrators and management consultants.

"This is the opportunity we have decided to offer you by establishing the Brong-Ahafo branch," he added.

Mr. Buatsi announced that within the past two years, a total of 83 participants had passed out in 2002 and 522 last year and expressed the belief that the number would reach about 1,000 this year.

"The prestige of professionalism always goes with a lot of hard work, discipline and devotion to the calling," he said, adding that the goal of the Institute was to inspire professionals who ended up becoming administrators, irrespective of their vocation, to pursue high excellence and get licensed as chartered administrators and management consultants. The Institute has branches, apart from Accra, in the Central, Western, Ashanti, Northern and now Brong Ahafo regions and the Eastern and Volta Region would have their turn within the next two weeks.

He further announced that the Institute had acquired 40 building plots of land in Accra to be developed for the first Ghana Management Village, with a centre for research work.

In a welcoming address Mr. Samuel Ankama Obour, Secretary of the Sunyani Polytechnic said the Institute was aimed at producing a crop of professionally trained strategic administrators who would improve and propel the economy of Ghana and Africa far beyond the new millennium.

Mr. Obour expressed gratitude to the founding members of the Brong-Ahafo branch, saying the establishment of the Institute in the region would curtail the shuttling of members between Sunyani and Accra every weekend to attend lectures for both the professional and pre-professional programmes.

He said more applicants had continued to register for the two programmes with the secretariat in Brong-Ahafo, stressing that it was the aim of the secretariat to ensure that people in the region enjoyed the existing dispensations available to participants before it would be stopped in 2005.

After 2005, even persons holding Doctor of Philosophy degrees in any field would be required to be examined for membership, hence the urgent need for participants in the region to enrol by the seminar method, Mr. Obour said.

Mr. Ignatius Baffour-Awuah, Sunyani Municipal Chief Executive noted that qualities like discipline, courage and industry were typical characteristics of administrators, who used to be models of decent social behaviour worthy of emulation.

He, however, expressed regret that in recent times such virtues had been supplanted with vices, which hitherto were unknown in the country. There had been a lot of criticism by the public regarding the excessive bureaucratic, corrupt and slow administrative practices in the public service, he said and appealed to members of the Institute to accept the challenge and work towards the realization of an efficient and effective public administration system.