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The Futility of Cabinet Reshuffles
By Nii Moi Thompson
There are increasing calls for yet another cabinet reshuffle.
The president should reject these calls and concentrate instead
on building 21st-century institutions that meet the needs of 24
million Ghanaians with efficacy, equity, and of course
efficiency.
Cabinet reshuffles don’t do any of these. They are an archaic
form of political management that needlessly strikes fear in
ministers, disrupts their professional concentration and
personal lives, and, worse, leaves the fundamental causes of
governmental ineptitude untouched. They represent, in the words
of Shakespeare, sound and fury that ultimately signify nothing.
(Liberia's president recently dismissed her entire cabinet save
one. That says more about her own judgment and leadership
capabilities than it does her victims, all of whom she selected
presumably on the basis of competence. Could they all have been
so incompetent after all? Or, in selecting them, did she, as
president, make a monumental error in judgment for which she -
not they - should be punished?).
In Ghana, President J.A. Kufuor could have achieved a lot more
in his eight years if he had been less fond of cabinet
reshuffles (and the whimsical renaming of ministries) and
concentrated instead on building modern institutions for
national development. Public sector reforms and "private sector
development" under him seemed more designed to impress donors
than to advance the cause of Ghana's development.
The Ministry of Employment and Social Welfare, for example, had
five ministers over eight years and was renamed twice. Not
surprisingly, many critical initiatives, such as the
much-ballyhooed presidential summit on employment, never
materialized. Low job creation was the Achilles heel of his
legacy of high economic growth, most of it propelled by
capital-intensive industries like mining and a voracious but
inefficient public procurement machinery.
Already, the current Ministry of Youth and Sports is on its
third minister in less than two years; a few other ministries
have had their ministers shuffled about already.
But the fundamental problems of these and other ministries
remain. They are plagued by outmoded and inefficient systems,
inadequate budgets, and lack of a critical mass of
well-motivated mid-level staff to support ministers at the top
and provide operational direction to the frontline deliverers of
development at the bottom.
Successive public sector reforms have had some effect but failed
in the main to bring the sector into the 21st century. Most
government processes today are the same as they were 80 years
ago when the population was less than a quarter of what it is
now and the focus of government was colonial exploitation not
national development.
As a result, the bureaucracy is overwhelmed and incapable of
responding to the development needs of Ghanaians, irrespective
of which government is in power or which minister is in office.
At the same time, budgets for 'services' and 'investments',
which are needed to address these deficiencies, have been
consistently slashed over the years and the money used to
finance an already-bloated government wage bill. The upshot is a
paradox of a large army of public sector employees who get paid
regularly for doing nothing because they are given nothing to
work with.
The brazen and reckless politicization of the technocracy
(mid-level staff) is another weakness in the development
machinery which cabinet reshuffles cannot fix. This situation
has been aggravated in recent times by the 'proceed on leave'
virus.
The sum effect is that highly competent Ghanaians have taken up
positions with international organizations and even foreign
governments as new governments come to power and force them out
for one flimsy reason or the other. We invest in their education
and then turn around to find some lame reasons not to reap the
rewards of that investment. This is madness.
State-owned enterprises have not been spared either. Cronyism
aligned with the electoral cycle has turned them into revolving
doors for mediocrity, incompetence and impunity with every
change of government. ECG and GWC typify this rank perversion of
state enterprises at the expense of professionalism and the
public good as they extract successively higher tariffs from
consumers but ensure the continued provision of substandard
service because nobody gets fired no matter how incompetent they
may be.
And then there is the productive (or private) sector, which is
fragmented, weak, bereft of innovation, victimized or
marginalized by successive governments, and ill-prepared for the
rigors of globalization. Work ethic and management practices in
the sector remain poor, even primitive. The fortunes (or
misfortunes) of many businesses now rise and fall with the
electoral cycle, despite a seeming national consensus that the
“private sector is the engine of growth”.
This politically motivated subversion of the sector is part of
the reason the Ghanaian economy has been posting impressive but
jobless rates of growth for decades. It is the ultimate source
of all the restlessness of the nation’s youth and in particular
the recent phenomenon of “foot soldiers”.
To be sure, leadership still matters, if only because it too
requires some institutional “reforms” to make it purposeful and
effective. One gets the impression that many high-ranking
officials, including some ministers, are appointed without any
clear mandate as to exactly what is expected of them and how
they would be assessed. Nor do they fully appreciate the
enormity of the task they face and the constraints involved:
Delivering development in four years, which means that every
single moment of their time in office matters.
Regrettably, some of these officials don't even recognize the
fact that time is a resource – the ultimate resource – for
development. To misuse time is to misuse all other resources,
including the yet-to-be-pumped oil that we are all salivating
over.
Besides their habitual lateness to everything, many public
officials spend precious work hours indulging in frivolous and
unprofitable things like newspaper reviews, often forced to
discuss issues that they clearly know little or nothing about
but yet lack the humility and integrity to concede as much. Not
surprisingly, they sometimes end up igniting controversies that
have absolutely nothing to do with their work, creating needless
distractions from the more serious business of national
development.
Beyond their vanity, such officials constitute a drag on
governance and their outright dismissal from government would
actually do more to enhance the president's development agenda
than would any nebulous reshuffle which would amount to little
more than a costly game of musical chairs.
If it's a question of explaining or defending government's
policies, we have the Ministry of Information and the scores of
PROs that government employs to do just that. If that proves
inadequate, any of the numerous party spokespersons can always
step in to help, but ministers must be ministers. Period!
Lastly, retributive 'private sector development' must give way
to a nationalistic promotion of Ghanaian businesses, ranging
from the small-and-medium-scale enterprises that will create
jobs for all Ghanaians, irrespective of their political
affiliation, to Ghanaian multinationals that would successfully
compete with the likes of Vodafone and STX in the global
marketplace and bring home billions of dollars in foreign
revenue and contracts to support national development.
The recent agitations by party 'foot soldiers' and the
grumblings from the less vocal segment of the youth population
over lack of decent jobs is the cumulative effect of over 30
years of jobless growth. And we can't tackle this problem
successfully if we alienate the very Ghanaian businesses that
would create jobs; government’s job-creating capacity is
limited. We need a nationalist alliance between government and
business – an alliance based on ethics, mutual respect, fair
play and a common pursuit of the national interest, not family
or party interests as we have seen in recent times.
If the worry is that an individual businessman may use
government contracts to finance opposition political activities,
then the solution is to have election laws to prevent that, not
blindly punish businesses which employ Ghanaians of all
political stripes and even those without any interest in
politics whose only interest is to be able to feed themselves
and their families. To punish an entire business because of the
potential transgressions of a single individual is to suppress
growth and contribute to an already precarious unemployment
situation whose consequences – in the form of rising violent
crimes, for example - affect us all, irrespective of our
political or ideological proclivities.
We should know better. And of course do better.
Write to Nii Moi
Email: niimoi@yahoo.com
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