The Ghana Trades Union Congress (TUC) has strongly expressed outrage at what it describes as the recent spate of acts of malfeasance within the public service and called for the strengthening of the civil service rules to nip the situation in the bud.
It called on the government to lead the way for a durable institutional reform in full knowledge that “the rot in the public service is a systemic one.”
In an interview with the Daily Graphic, the Secretary-General of the TUC, Mr Kofi Asamoah, said “the ease with which people with political power are able to side-step expert advice and civil service rules is alarming and needs to be stopped.”
“We need standardised rules across the public service and to reduce discretion in the award of executive compensation and perks, and leadership is urgently needed in this direction.
“A weak system such as what we have cannot correct itself without strong, decisive and dedicated leadership,” he said, adding that “we expect the President to offer that leadership.”
Explaining the rationale for his call, he said, “the attention of the TUC has been drawn to the multiplicity of scandals that have rocked the state, as well as the government and its functionaries.”
The latest, he said, being the purported housing of the Commissioner for the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ) in a hotel at a cost running into thousands of United States dollars; the alleged construction of a fence at the Ghana Embassy in Ouagadougou at a cost of US$600,000 and the ongoing revelations at the Presidential Commission of Inquiry into the Brazil World Cup debacle.
“We are compelled to comment on these recent scandals given that previous scandals and allegations such as those emanating from the GYEEDA and SUBAH remain unresolved and the perpetrators are walking free.”
“For the Commissioner of CHRAJ, an institution that is supposed to be helping the country to address economic and administrative injustices, to be embroiled in this scandal shows the depth into which we have sunk as a nation in managing our meagre resources,” he stated.
According to Mr Asamoah, even more alarming is the growing body of evidence that the commissioner’s case was just a tip of the iceberg, saying that other heads of state institutions with the same rank as the commissioner or above had rented for themselves houses that cost the taxpayer US$7,000 or more per month.
“We suspect on reasonable grounds and on the basis of information that is already in the public domain that the extent of malfeasance in the public sector is huge and reaching dangerous levels. In the midst of alleged scarcity, if public officials could undertake such spending binges then it is not only difficult to understand but also risky for national progress,” he said.
Moreover, Mr Asamoah said “the TUC and the entire labour front are disgusted by these scandals and, more so, by the seeming failure of national political leadership to bring appropriate sanctions to bear on the perpetrators of these heinous economic crimes against the people of Ghana.”
“These scandals show how our political leaders, people into whose hands we have entrusted our resources, have chosen to manage them. And this is a country where the government has so eloquently convinced us all that the “meat is down to the bone” and there is no more resources to go round,” he said.
He said district assemblies had not received their Common Fund since the beginning of 2014, while nearly all public service institutions and agencies including the special schools had not received subventions that had been budgeted for them.
Yet, he said, “we have money to waste in the manner we are witnessing.”
“The TUC and its member unions and their workers, and indeed the people of Ghana feel affronted and assaulted. Our resources are being mismanaged deliberately and wantonly for the benefits of the few in political power or connected to political power,” he said.
Mr Asamoah said the high-level corruption and the profligacy of public officials were depriving the state of resources to address the many developmental challenges the country faced.
The TUC Secretary-General, therefore, called on the government and, in particular, the President to act and do so quickly.
“The deafening silence and failure to act raises all sorts of questions and suspicions and it isn’t good for the image of the President and the Presidency.”
“We call on the President to sack all those in his government whose names have come up in the recurring spate of malfeasance,” he said, adding “we are not pronouncing guilty verdict on those people; we are merely asking that they should give way for the investigative processes to run their full course.”
He noted, for instance, that it was difficult to justify why the former Minister of Youth and Sports should continue to enjoy the pecks of public office and, more so, in the comfort of the President’s Office, given all the revelations from the Presidential Commission.
Mr Asamoah said dispensing with the “services” of corrupt state officials is good for the image of the President and the Presidency as it would also signal to the current appointees that the Presidency would not tolerate such malfeasance in future and public confidence in the state and its institutions would be rebuilt.
For the Commissioner of CHRAJ, he said “we have heard her explanations; they are not convincing to us. We call on her to step aside to allow for full-scale investigations to be done.”
