From my Rooftop: Government business and courtesy calls
Government business, as could be expected, can be expansive. There are those strategic meetings that could travel deep into the night to plot serious development strategies; there are the regular cabinet meetings to discuss serious national issues and the usual workshops, seminars and conferences which are used as platforms by government officials to open the lid on government policies and programmes and use the same to receive feedbacks and to test the effectiveness of government business.
Advertisement
It is to facilitate government business that various ministries have been created, both the traditional ones and those created at the fancy of every new government, alongside the departments and agencies of state to tackle defined sectors of national development.
The presidency, which is the pinnacle and nerve-centre of government, must by necessity assume the characteristics of all the ministries, departments and agencies combined.
Apart from attending to all the businesses mentioned earlier, the seat of government is also a target for various interest groups who believe that the best and most effective way of getting attention and receiving recognition is to present themselves at the The Castle, formerly, and now Flagstaff House.
Among the groups are foreign delegations of business people all claiming to be investors who have the magic wand for our never-healthy economy, diplomats, social groups, religious bodies, chiefs and old schoolmates.
Some of the objectives of the visiting delegations can be as mundane as going to wish the President well and to congratulate him on his elevation to the highest office of the land. Others go to announce the death of a chief or someone who in the estimation of the bereaved family was an important national figure whose demise must be announced to the President personally.
I have never set eyes on the daily routine of a President but I can hazard one. The day will usually begin with a security briefing on the state of the nation and where there are possible security threats to the nation.
The President will also receive a situation report (Sitrep) from the Chief of Staff and quickly go through the confidential mails from the Special Care or Confidential Registry before checking the diary for the day’s scheduled assignments which would inevitably include meetings, receiving visiting delegations and possibly attending out-of-office programmes such as delivering speeches at workshops, seminars and conferences, and using those opportunities to market the government on its policies, plans, programmes and achievements.
On a normal day, by the time the President finishes his day’s schedule of assignments, the day would have come to an end and he would have had very little time to spend some critical moments to think of serious problems confronting the nation.
If the daily schedule, as I guessed here, remains a regular feature of the presidency, it means the President will for most of the time be receiving delegations, delivering speeches, most of which would not necessarily represent his thoughts or ideas, but flowing from pens of speechwriters, among them government propagandists who have very little time to reflect soberly on national problems.
Under the circumstances, the President of the Republic will be relying mostly on the briefings by his ministers and party apparatchik without necessarily making independent assessment of the situation on the ground. No doubt, with all the lofty plans and the sweet things we have been fed with most of the time, this country is still trapped in poverty, joblessness and misery. Not too strange is the fact that there is a vast gap between what our governments tell us they want to do and what they end up doing.
If government machinery is functioning effectively, the presidency should be the last resort and this will reduce considerably the traffic to the Flagstaff House. The ministries, departments and agencies should be able to take a lot of the workload from the shoulders of the presidency and leave it to concentrate on serious government business.
The regional and district coordinating councils should be able to function in such a way that people with grievances do not have to travel to Accra to the Flagstaff House before getting the assurance that their problems can be addressed.
Some of the foreign delegations whether diplomats or business groups should not go beyond ministerial levels. There is no need for a minister of a foreign country visiting Ghana calling on the Vice-President and later calling on the President. Is it because we are so desperate for external support that we do not want to conform to international protocols that allow visiting dignitaries to be received by their equal counterparts?
It is obvious that our country is not enjoying the best of health irrespective of what those who are at the centre of power may proclaim and our Executive President, on whose head lay all our problems, should find the time to devise solutions. The presidency must make the work of the ministries and other state institutions easier by restricting visitors to the presidency, limiting it to the most important.
We agree that the presidency must be accessible to as many people as possible but that should also mean that there should be schedule officers that could represent the President and take care of most of the visits and leave the President to do more serious things.
There is no need for delegations to travel to the presidency to hand an invitation to a traditional festival personally to the President. There is no justification for the President to spend the whole day receiving a funeral delegation when that could be done more conveniently by the regional and district coordinating councils on his behalf.
Politically we may think that uncontrolled open-door policy will be yielding dividends but in reality, just like what our free-for-all trade liberalisation has done to our local industries, the practice will only reduce the presidency to a ceremonial one and push serious things into the background.
Article by Kofi Akordor
Writer's email:[email protected]