Why The Head Of Local Government Service, Dr. Callistus Mahama Must Be Sacked-part Iii

Dr. Callistus Mahama

This is the third in the series of my write ups on the above subject matter. As promised in the second part, this is going to take a break from the publications of the Local Government Service since Dr. Callistus Mahama took over as Head of Service and look at how inexperienced Dr. Callistus Mahama incompetently explained away the five issues we raised in our petition.

I apologies for the inability to get the part two of this series published on my usual platform and as it stands now I am not sure of getting this one published either. It appears to me the enemy has taken hold of that platform and I tried severally but never got a response from the editor or the article published. I will still try my best to get back to them. But I want to assure the enemy that this will not deter me at all. I am still resolute and remain relentless to see rights things done in the Local Government Service. The enemy might have money and earthly power. I have no money but TRUTH and the end will justify the means. Until I am able to get back, you can still read these articles on the facebook page of Progressive Public Servants for the Total Overhaul of the Public Sector (PPSTOPS), my personal facebook and LinkedIn page. Please share as widely as possible. I thank you all for the support so far.

As I said in Part one, I met Dr. Callistus Mahama with the Chief Director on 1^st September, 2015 (if you remember this is the day of the Assembly elections) and later with the leadership of the group of the Administrative Officers on 7^th October, 2015 after we petitioned the Council and brought CLOGSAG into the picture. I will try my best to summarise the issues raised in our petition and the response Dr. Callistus Mahama gave to them to expose his incompetence.

First of all, the way and manner Dr. Callistus Mahama even went about the discussions at the second meeting leaves much to be desire. What I know is that the petitioner is made to state his case first. And so before we went in for the meeting we had prepared a presentation gathering more facts in support of our case. At the meeting we asked to present our case so that he could now come in. As usual of him as I have heard before, he rejected it and went ahead to explain away the issues saying after his explanation, we can now do our presentation. Does this make sense? I immediately sense danger here!

Then came to the explanation of the first item on the petition which had to do with the composition of the Local Government Service Council. Dr. Callistus Mahama looked into the face of the executives of CLOGSAG and said I think this one we have talked about it and there is no need for me to repeat it here again. And some Executives of CLOGSAG nodded in the affirmative. Then I asked myself, is it CLOGSAG that raised the issue or us? Then the danger I sensed earlier was being confirmed. Then what transpired between us and CLOGSAG executives before we came to the meeting started playing in my head and I told myself CLOGSAG has been compromised. Before the meeting the CLOGSAG Executives asked one of their members who was also a regional representative on our group not to join us in the meeting and we resisted. I remember vividly the warning some of our members gave to me when we decided to bring CLOGSAG on board and my response was always that I don’t trust them either but for this case I am going in with an open mind and see what they will do. Lo and behold, CLOGSAG did exactly what we expected of them. Connived and betrayed the cause!

The next issue on the petition was the arbitrary and illegal revision of our scheme and condition of Service. In the petition we drew Dr. Callistus Mahama to the illegality of the processes he adopted to revise the scheme of Service and thereby changing our conditions of service without regard to the due process and the law. We quoted copiously from the 1992 constitution, the Local Government Service Act, the Labour Law and even circulars from the public services commission to drum home the point to the Head of Service that it is illegal to do what he did with our scheme of service. In explaining this issue, Dr. Callistus Mahama restricted it to promotions and said promotions are based on availability of vacancies and funds. We, at that meeting, proved to Dr. Callistus Mahama and his team that vacancies exist in the service and this is a fact in the service. On availability of funds, we said yes, we know the economic situation in the country now and we were ready to forgo any arrears as a compromise so that we can correct this anomaly and avoid the constitutional breaches. All Dr. Callistus Mahama could say was that, “We can’t do that”. If not incompetence and lack of understanding of the issues, I don’t even see how availability of funds and vacancies can result in this unconstitutional act by Dr. Callistus Mahama.

On this same issue, he tried to use grade alignment in the Social Welfare and Community Development Class to justify the change in promotion years. This is, as I have said before, a palpable falsehood. Copies of the original scheme of service produced in 2010 are available. Social Welfare and Community Development Class had 5 grades in the professional class and 4 grades in the sub-professional just as it is contained in Dr. Callistus Mahama’s revised scheme of service. The only difference between Dr. Callistus Mahama’s revised scheme of service and that produced in 2010 are the following:

1. Foreword illegally signed by Dr. Callistus Mahama for self aggrandisement
2. Creation of non-promotional grades which our petition recognised as problematic
3. Change of promotion years from 3 to 4 years
4. And compiling the various schemes as existed before in one single document. Even some of the errors contained in the previous ones have been repeated in his revised scheme of service.

On this scheme of service, I have said it before that I will go to court and I mean it. The appointed time will surely come.

On appointment of Heads of Departments, we said the use of different criteria to appoint people to positions of same status or rank is not fair. A Head of Department is a Head of Department and will enjoy same status in the organisation and in advertising you don’t set different criteria for it in terms of experience and rank like he did for Central Administration Department and Works department. We also added that the over reliance on paper qualification at the expense of hands-on-experience was a recipe for disaster. This simple fact, Dr. Callistus Mahama failed to appreciate and did what I called “Pick N Choose” by explaining that Works Department was a technical area and when they checked, there were no enough senior most staff there and so they had to reduce the requirements to senior engineer and so on and so forth. As for the experience and paper qualification, he did not touch it. The question I want to ask Dr. Callistus Mahama is, how many senior engineers with two(2) years working experience in Management Position did he appoint as Heads of Works Department in that exercise? At least in the Northern Region, the answer is very few. The point here is, best practise requires that minimum requirements for a position are set and advertised as such despite what you know or don’t know. Then when you are short listing and realise that you are not getting the people as required, you can now look at what you have and decide to lower the requirement looking at the experience and qualifications of the people who applied. This, Dr. Calistus eventually did because he could not still get his the senior engineers etc. he needed so he had to pick Assistant Engineers (equivalence of Assistant Director IIB, Assistant Development Planning Officers etc.) and yet me and you, who have higher grades than that cannot head other departments.

As you can even see, in this meeting Dr. Callistus Mahama contradicted himself when he talks about promotions and availability of vacancies. And again his answers to the appointment of Head of Departments raised more questions than answers. In that meeting, one of us asked him if the Administrative Class is a technical class or not and Dr. Callistus Mahama answered in the affirmative. Again, let’s come to think of the position of Head of Department. Is it a Management Position or not? Remember it is these Heads of Departments that virtually make up the District Coordinating and Planning unit (DPCU), what I called the engine of the MMDAs. And if the current arguments on the position of District Coordinating Director (DCD), which I accept, is anything to go by, do we really need a technical person to be a Head of Department? Just asking questions and this does not necessarily represent my views on the position of Head of Departments. At the appropriate time I will make my stance on these things known. Reforms as I know are supposed to correct lapses and not create more problems.

I will end here and the next part will deal with the remaining issues in our petition. I shall surely be back.

Charles A. Akurugu
[email protected]