This is a thought I have held since 2012 when some mass recruitments were done by the service. In that exercise, the financial clearance that I saw was for the recruitment of a little over 2,600 staff. By May of 2013 when I had stopped tallying, the figure had crossed the 3000 mark and still we had people being recruited and posted to the districts, sometimes direct from the headquarters to the district without passing it through the Regional Coordinating Council as required. Remember, that was an election year and political expediency was at play and you dared not question such recklessness.
This year 2016, some clandestine recruitment exercise seems to have taken place or ongoing. Clandestine because unlike the 2012 exercise which was widely advertised, this one was not. I first heard of it somewhere in August when a colleague whispered to me that there was some recruitment of Assistant Development Planning Officers (ADPO) taking place and that it was on sale for GH¢7,000.00 or so.
The “on sale” aspects of the story cannot be confirmed but information on the ground confirms the recruitment has happened. Just as in 2012, there is some hullabaloo about tribal bias, arbitrary and selective placement on grades in the recruitment, renewing and generating fresh anger in some quarters.
This would not be the thrust of this write-up. As a matter of fact, in the 2012 recruitment exercise, I am aware of the initial gruelling interview sessions after the “tough” aptitude test and the later hand picking appointment of people who never wrote the aptitude test or undertook any interview. This is also not going to be discussed here today.
The point to be made today is that even in the midst of this carelessness and perceived and/or real corruption, we could and/or should have done things differently to at least pushed our Local Government and Decentralisation experimentation to a modest pedestal. Rather we failed at it and woefully so if you ask. What we succeeded in doing is recruiting unnecessary numbers of people into classes we really didn’t need badly and completely neglecting classes we really needed urgently if we were serious in ensuring that the local government structures work as envisaged and planned. And so what we have done is pack the assemblies with many otherwise productive people who go to work do virtually nothing and go to the bank at the end of the month for their take home pay which never takes them home anyway. In some cases, first degree holders are reduced to just recording minutes of meetings, a job task that should be done by stenographers and Executive Officers according to the Scheme of Service of the Service.
Two critical departments of the assemblies, if we are to take our development serious, are the Physical Planning Department and Trade, Industry and Tourism Department. The functions of the Department of Physical Planning amongst many others critical to our forward march include managing the activities of the Department of Town and Country Planning and the Department of Parks and Gardens; preparation of physical plans as a guide for the formulation of development policies and decisions and to design projects in the district; undertake street naming, numbering of house and related Issues etc.
In fact, about twenty (20) critical functions as outlined in L. I. 1961. The physical Planning Department is virtually non-existent in many district assemblies as the Town and Country Planning Department has been starved of staff for a very long time.
In fact, in the recent street naming and house numbering exercise, one of the main challenges in getting it done in many districts was the limited staff the Town and Country Planning department had. I vividly still remember how we used to chase one staff of the Regional Town and Country Planning Department who was assigned to our district and many other districts.
Given the opportunity to recruit as was done in 2012 and now, the proper thing for me, would have been to give priority to these departments by recruiting into and ensuring that these departments at least exist with some skeletal staff. Give them some two (2) weeks intensive induction training and put them under the tutelage of the few remaining experience Town and Country Planning Officers and they would have been good to go as Physical Planners of our assemblies. And with the continuous professional development training policies of the Service, they would become masters of their job in no time.
Similar arguments can be made for the Department of Trade, Industry and Tourism especially as we are seriously talking about industrialization, Tourism and Local Economic Development; and the Department of Natural Resources Conversation as we keep talking about deforestation and climate change etc. To ignore these yearning needs and keep recruiting what the system really don’t badly need amounts to we not knowing how to put money where our mouth is. Not surprising though because this appears to be part and parcel of our national life with no apparent end in sight. The examples abound.
The case even gets worse when you hear the current talk and stance of the people who matter in the Local Government Service. Whilst these departments, important as they are, are non-existent in many assemblies and those that exist are ill and under resourced, there is talk of creating more departments. Completely unnecessary, if you ask.
The first time I heard of it, I thought it was a joke until it was recently re-echoed in some quarters by the same persons I first heard it from. This supposedly, I hear, is the solution to the confusion that greeted the processes leading to the appointment of Heads of Departments for Central Administration.
Oh my God! I can’t think far but I can think madness. I am speechless and lost for words. To say the least, I think this is absurd and it all boils down to the thinking with which we diagnose our problems. We cannot keep doing the same things and expect different results. Let’s get serious. I end here but will surely be back!
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