General News of Tuesday, 24 April 2018
Source: primenewsghana.com
2018-04-24
President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo
Member of Parliament for South Dayi Rockson-Nelson Dafeamekpor, has said President Nana Addo was insincere with the figures he submitted to parliament as the list of persons working at the Jubilee House.
According to the Member of Parliament, the number of workers at the Jubilee House is 1,697 according to government’s own figures in the 2018 budget and not 998 as presented to parliament.
President Akufo-Addo on Friday 20, April 2018 revealed that a total of 998 people works at the seat of government, the Jubilee House in Accra.
President Akufo-Addo made the revelation in a list he presented to Parliament in compliance with Section 11 of the Presidential Office Act, 1993 (Act 463), which requires the President to submit annually to Parliament, a report on the staffing position of the Office of the President.
The breakdown was given as nine ministers of state, 27 presidential staffers, 256 other/junior appointees and 706 employees of public/civil service staff.
However, speaking on Accra based radio station, Class FM, on Monday, April 23, 2018, Member of Parliament for South Dayi Rockson-Nelson Dafeamekpor said some names have been omitted from the list.
He said: “We have six more names in the office of the Senior Minister that haven’t featured on the list. We have my own friend Nii Teiko Tagoe who is the Director of Social Media at the Office of the Presidency whose name hasn’t featured on the list and a host of other names at other departments under the office of the presidency who have been deliberately taken out of the list.”
He noted that in appendix seven of the 2017 budget statement, “The government gave an indication that the total list of employees that they have for 2017 was 963 but from the letter that has been sent to parliament in respect of the total number of employees at the office of the president, it is 998 and we know that the names that I have mentioned, if you add them to the list, they’ve reached the 1000 barrier.”
He continued: “We are going by the government’s own numbers. If I refer you to the 2018 budget statement, ironically, the same appendix seven, if you look at the total number of employees for 2018 for which budgetary allocation has been made for staff of office of the president, it comes to 1697. This is not a figure we are concocting”.
Meanwhile, the Information Minister, Mustapha Hamid has justified the list of 998 Presidential staffers working under the Akufo-Addo government amidst negative public reaction.
According to him, the recruitment of the over 900 staffers was necessitated by the establishment of several development authorities and the creation of additional government agencies.
Speaking in an interview on Joy FM, the Information Minister noted that the Akufo-Addo government is operating within a budget more than half less of what the previous government with 768 staffers had. He said, “our list, for example, is a little above the President Mahama list. But if you look at the budget for office machinery under President Mahama, it is way above our budget…For 2017 they had about ¢3 billion but we came in 2017 with about ¢1.5 billion”.
Mustapha Hamid further stated that President Akufo-Addo is committed to protecting the national purse despite the huge number, and argued that “it is possible for two people presiding over a nation to squander its resources as opposed to perhaps a hundred people who are more prudent and more committed to the saving of the national purse”.