“If the number of ministers is an indication of performance and development, Ghana’s first president Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah would have appointed 6000 ministers to run his administration.”
According to the Managing Editor of the Insight Newspaper Kwasi Pratt Jnr , the number of ministers a president appoints is an indication of the his/her ability and extent to which he/she can stand to pressures.
While indicating that he is not the only president to come under pressure when it comes to appointments, he observed that Ghanaians need to help the President Nana Addo to resist pressures by telling him the truth even though it is his constitutional mandate to appoint ministers
He revealed that under the nine-year reign of Nkrumah he did a lot and till date no one has been able to surpass his achievements but he did all with 44 ministers wondering why President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo will assemble 110 ministers the first in the history of the country.
Mr Pratt also shot down claims that they require more hands to deliver on the party’s campaign promises for which reason 110 ministers were engaged.
“Are we going to cut timber that we need such numbers…we must work and ensure that the country develop but not with such numbers. The number of ministers is not indicative of development. You should stop telling us the work is huge and so on. Is the work you do today more than Kwame Nkrumah”, he asked.
The President has come under fire for appointing of 110 ministers when he earlier promised to cut superfluous government spending.
The appointment of 50 deputy ministers and four ministers of state in addition to the existing 56 roles make it a record for Ghana and the largest government since the country, of about 27 million inhabitants, adopted a democratic constitution in 1992.
But in defense he said “I’m aware that people are concerned about what they see as maybe the cost of this large government,” Akufo-Addo admitted in an interview on GTV.
“It is a necessary investment to make for the rapid transformation of this country” he said and added that ministers “are coming to work, it is not going to be a holiday”.
Akufo-Addo was elected in December on a manifesto to fix a host of economic problems and fight corruption.
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