Akufo-Addo Is No Expatriate Administrator, Dr. Bampoe

The widespread belief that the average Ghanaian civil servant has poor work habits or is plain lazy, is not a new discovery or a sudden epiphany recently stumbled upon by President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo (See “We’re Not Lazy – CLOGSAG Replies Nana Addo” Citifmonline.com / Modernghana.com 5/2/17). As I vividly recall, nearly every trip that he made to the United States during which he had occasion to confer with and/or interact with members of the Ghanaian community in the Diaspora, between 2001 and 2009, then-President John Agyekum-Kufuor spared no prime opportunity to plead with Ghanaians resident abroad, especially those of us in the West, to return home in order to teach some of our healthily acquired work habits to our brothers and sisters back home. And believe me, dear reader, nearly every Ghanaian leader since President Kwame Nkrumah has bitterly lamented the widely perceived gross lassitude of the average civil servant and blue-collar worker towards their government-salaried job.

And while it is all too natural, and perhaps even logical, to hear Dr. Isaac Bampoe, the Executive Secretary of the Civil and Local Government Staff Association of Ghana (CLOGSAG), strongly and publicly dispute the President’s call for the Ghanaian civil servant and/or public worker to change his/her putatively lethargic attitude towards paid work, nevertheless, it is equally laughable for Dr. Bampoe to cavalierly claim that it is only an insignificant percentage or marginal and statistically insignificant proportion of the Ghanaian government/state employee who falls in that category. In our particular instance, however, it is unarguably the stereotype that constitutes the norm. In other words, the average Ghanaian worker has been reliably, perennially and extensively observed to have little patience or a patently unremarkable sense of civic responsibility.

It may very well be that this seemingly pathological and regressive attitude towards paid taxpayer-underwritten salaried labor developed as part of the passive resistance strategy to Western colonial imperialism, whereby the violently and criminally dispossessed and occupationally cannibalized lower- and middle-level African civil service employee came to envisage his/her reconfigured work environment as a veritably oppressive imported culture to be fiercely resisted. But it is, of course, no tangible excuse for salaried deliberate under-productiveness. Consequently, the adoption of such ploys as malingering and the deliberately sluggish approach to the “taxing” rhythm of time and pace of work commencement and completion.

But, of course, it also ought to be promptly underscored the fact that the average Ghanaian leader and/or politician is absolutely no exception. Even as I write, we continue to have politicians who arrive at long pre-scheduled conferences, affairs and events of considerable social and political, as well as economic, significance by as many as two-to-four hours behind schedule, only to spend the next several minutes of precious time profusely, theatrically and quixotically apologizing for temporal snags or delays that could clearly have easily been avoided, only if these leaders had cultivated meticulous sense of urgency or respect for time at an early stage in their lives.

Indeed, I have had both the patently unwarranted misfortune and morally and practically untenable annoyance of having to wait a couple of hours, or more, right here in New York City, to hear then-Candidate John Agyekum-Kufuor address members of the Ghanaian community about the pace, pulse and temperature of the political culture back home. The now-President Akufo-Addo, when he was the presidential candidate of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), had been equally guilty of such temporal tardiness, and lassitude, if I may politely add. There is an old maxim which says that “What is good for the goose is also good for the gander.” Nana Akufo-Addo’s May/Labor Day counsel to the members of the Civil and Local Government Staff Association of Ghana cuts both ways, as New Yorkers are wont to say.

This problem may not entirely be the fault of the Ghanaian public and/or civil servant. As one labor expert and social scientist observed not very long ago, an overheated and malaria-infected environment may be a pivotal part of the problem. Some experts have even suggested the need for policymakers to adapt our working hours in such a way that they become conducive to the vagaries of local environmental and climatic conditions, and move productively away from the largely environmentally and climatically disengaged work schedule inherited from our former Western-European colonial overlords. I guess former President Kufuor’s introduction of the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) was one way of dealing with this thorny problem. There may be a legion of others, including the functionally pragmatic reconfiguration of work hours that need to be seriously explored.

*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
May 5, 2017
E-mail: [email protected]