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Monitoring performance of ministries great idea

It was an elated piece of news to hear last week that ministers of state are now going to sign performance contracts that will henceforth monitor their output.  Indeed, working smarter and with results is going to be the new order for them and it will sure expose those non-performing government appointees who do not deserve to be supported in office with the tax payer’s money .  

Smart work plans and performance contracts usually entail doing the right things in the right ways, at the right times with the right resources.  

What is exciting about this newly introduced performance monitoring is that the ministers themselves have had the opportunity to think through what they see as achievable in the interest of Ghana with the blessing of the President.  

Smart work plans are time bound and should fit into available budgets.   Those are critical success indicators in performance contracts.   

However, what the ministers should be mindful of is that success is not always in the big things.  

Success can be seen in the small everyday executions which include time management, cost savings in such areas as office stationery, entertainment, telephone and Internet usage, fuel and electricity.

The other good thing with introducing smarter work plans for government appointees, especially the ministers of state, is that we will now be able to minimise or avoid duplication in our ministries and institutions, take out the wanton waste in our system and chart a cause for harmonisation.   

There are a lot that some of the ministries can do together.  What for example can the ministries of Local Government and Tourism do together when it comes to beautification of our cities and creating tourist attractions?

Are the ministries of Education, Youth and Sports, Gender, Social Welfare and Health duplicating efforts on child welfare issues for example?

The way I see success for them is thinking smart with innovations and eliminating the business as usual kind of attitude.  It has been said many a time that Ghana’s problem is not that we are poor but rather that our managers are not innovative enough.    

And that is why I would strongly recommend Lee Kuan Yew’s book, From Third World to First: The Singapore Story 1965 to 2000 to all our modern day politicians and government appointees who are seeking to bring positive change to our country.

Lee Kuan Yew, the first Prime Minister of Singapore, a country that was at par with Ghana soon after independence, was able to bring dramatic and significant changes to his country within his time.  Today, Singapore is a thriving Asian metropolis with not only the world’s number one airline, the best airport, the busiest port of trade but also the world’s fourth highest per capita real income.  The significant thing is that Singapore has none of Ghana’s natural resources but has attained the highest because they saw the possibilities and applied the can-do spirit.

Would the introduction of performance contracts for our ministers of state and other government appointees help Ghana in anyway?  I strongly believe it would.  

The problems of Ghana are not new.  Other countries have gone through similar if not worse situations before, be it energy, water, agriculture, health, education or housing.  

All we need is the commitment to learn and apply, after all these same appointees travel abroad all the time to conferences and meetings.   It is time for them to observe and learn when they travel and come back home with something new to apply.     

Despite over two decades of publicly celebrating our farmers every December, we are still importing food items such as plantains, tomatoes and onions from neighbouring countries that have the same climatic conditions as Ghana.  

We are still committing our scarce foreign exchange to importing rice, chicken and fish.   Where we have abundant harvest as we sometimes do with such fruits as oranges, avocado pears and mangoes, we are still not able to preserve them for future use.  Sometimes too they get rotten at farm gates due to lack of access roads and inappropriate marketing channels.    Would performance contracts do any tricks this time around?

We are dying to see when potable water will be available for every Ghanaian and when we will bridge the housing deficit gap that we face today.  We are looking to see Accra turned into the real millennium city rid of filth and open gutters.  

Acquiring a passport as a national is still agonising and one cannot understand why that is so.  Is that going to change?  Is the journey from Accra to Kumasi by road now going to be possible in three to four hours?  

Is the location address system going to happen in 2013, so we can begin to apply to Ghana Post for postal deliveries to our homes while creating opportunities for jobs and income generation for Ghana Post?  I am confident that with performance monitoring in place, we are in for better times.

The idea of entering into a contract is that one consents to keep to their side of the bargain. With the introduction of work plans and performance contracts, one can clearly see an end to that mentality that people should carry on enjoying juicy perks at the expense of the nation, regardless of their output. No, it is now going to be strictly: “no contribution, no chop.”

By Vicky Wireko
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