Seven ministries have handed over to the incoming NPP administration.
Lands, Forestry and Natural resources, Transport, Chieftancy, Food and Agriculture, Interior, Defence, Trade and industry, the joint-transition team of the NPP and NDC are toiling away.
Seven down, sixteen more to go.
A political transition means an out-going government handing over to an in-coming government.
A simple one-liner – but the devil is in the detail. And oh, the details are nothing short of overwhelming, Mustapha Hamid, spokesperson to the President-elect Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo could not stress enough.
The spokesperson, usually articulate, ran out of superlatives for the work ahead for his NPP team members.
“I don’t know whether copious is the right word. Perhaps there is no word that I have seen in the dictionary that can adequately capture what these documents are”.
“Not even voluminous, not even gargantuan” he said on Joy FM’s Super Morning Show, Thursday.
He described his own difficulty in lifting seven PhD-volume size documents of the Interior ministry which were handed over to NPP Transition team meber Ambrose Dery.
“Yesterday, out of courtesy and respect for my boss Ambrose Dery, I offerred to take his notes to his car for him. I couldn’t even lift it. It was in a box. It had to take great effort to put it on my head…to his car” he said.
“We are talking about at least 2,000 and more pages” his attempt at painting a mental picture of strenous ahead continued.
Like a student complains about cruel homework, Mustapha Hamid made a friendly whine about the sheer volume of work to be done.
And there is a deadline – in two weeks, the transition team are supposed to have pored over the documents well enough to muster a question to the out-going government officials to answer.
Start work.
“How is he [Ambrose Dery] able to read all that? He is not going to be able to read it in two-weeks?”he said.
The NPP solution may be predictable. As they assembled a team to collate votes, they have assembled another to take notes.
For a party cast as bourgeois, it seem a matter-of-course that they have assembled experts, bespectacled specialists to read, re-read and be sure they do not mis-read a sentence.
Like a beehive, these experts are supposed to lift up a considerable buzz around these volumes until a pure honey of understanding drips out of materials containing 8 years of government work.
“When they are done reading the notes…one of them will synthesize these notes into digestible material for the head of the committee”, Hamid’s English returned to him.
Some of these experts are former Controller and Accountant-Generals, retired soldiers, former BNI director and brilliant economists, the spokesperson for the President-elect revealed.
Admittedly, these experts have a weak spot for the NPP, he said, but professionally they have a strong spot for a thorough job.
“I met many of them yesterday for the first time…. I guess they would have sympathies for the party. Many of them are not card-bearing members” Akufo-Addo’s spokesperson explained.
The co-opted members of the NPP transition team have began their work. And more ministries are expected to give many more hard-covers of hard-core government work as the hardwork of hand-over continues.
By next Monday, the transfer should be complete.
If documents from Interior ministry could rob an otherwise articulate spokesperson of words, it remains to be seen the reaction when Finance Ministry documents land on the NPP transition desk.
Out-going Finance minister Seth Terkper [left] speaks to NPP’s Director of Fund-raising Ken Ofori-Atta
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