OccupyGhana, a pressure group, is demanding that President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo cutback the size of his government at this crucial moment of the economic crisis to, at least, the symbolise that Government also taking a hit by the current hardship.
The Group stated in a statement yesterday that “If as citizens, we are compelled to cut down on our private expenses, then it is time for the Government to do the same to protect the public purse.”
This is therefore a demand for an immediate and drastic reduction in size, the group said, not limited to ministers alone, but all of the President’s non-ministerial appointees. If for nothing at all, the symbolism in the Government also taking a hit, just like the rest of us, is very strong.
Read below the unedited statement from OccupyGhana:
Our ref: OG/2022/049
*OCCUPYGHANA PRESS STATEMENT*
*_Accra, 25 October 2022_*
*MR PRESIDENT, IT IS TIME FOR A ‘LEAN AND MEAN’ GOVERNMENT*
There is no time better than now, to reduce the size of the Government.
Times are hard. Things are hard. Very hard. Every Ghanaian is feeling the pinch and pain. To survive, citizens are forced to cut back on some essential things in life. The Government, which is largely to blame for the economic mess, must also cut back and more.
When in early 2017, the sheer size of the Government was revealed, we were not convinced that that was what Ghana required. In our press statement dated 17 March 2022, we criticised the President for that, stating that while ‘*_a government bureaucracy must be big enough to achieve the aims of the government_*,’ it must be ‘_*lean enough not to waste the resources of the state_*.’ We also pointed out that the ‘_*considerable amount of money in salaries, allowances and benefits… (in addition to enjoying a range of ex-gratia benefits when they leave office) does not sound to us like a diligent attempt to protect the public purse_*.’
However, in one of several responses to this criticism and others like ours, the President said to some new ministers that ‘_*as you know there are some who say my government is too big and there are too many of you. I am a firm believer in the adage the proof of the pudding is in the eating_*.’ Another time, the President called the size of his Government a ‘*_necessary investment_*’ and assured Ghanaians that ‘*_it is not going to be a holiday_*’ for the ministers.
Time has tested both ‘_*the investment_*’ and ‘_*the pudding_*,’ and they have not aged well and have been found wanting. The combined return, two years to the end of the President’s second term, is this debilitating economic crisis. Unless the President’s new and unacceptable argument would be that we would be in a much worse situation but for his still large coterie of ministers, it is time to get ‘lean and mean’. If as citizens, we are compelled to cut down on our private expenses, then it is time for the Government to do the same to protect the public purse.
This is therefore a demand for an immediate and drastic reduction in size, not limited to ministers alone, but all of the President’s non-ministerial appointees. If for nothing at all, the symbolism in the Government also taking a hit, just like the rest of us, is very strong.
These are not normal times and ‘business as usual’ won’t cut it. The excuses for having and paying a large batch of ministers and other appointees to produce the results we see now, to the extent that they have ever been justified (which we deny), wear perilously thin in these times.
