Thus, in 2003, J H Mensah, as Senior Minister and in charge of public sector reform, remarked, "After five years of reform and experimentation … the public services have not enhanced their ability to deliver services.
They have not become more cost effective. And they have not become any more accountable to the public through changes in their methods or work than they were when we started on this reform process.”
Prof Mills had, as Vice President between 7 January 1997 and 7 January 2001chaired the Overview Reform Committee of the National Institutional Reforms Programmes.
But, as international researchers Sandbrook and Oelbaum observed afterwards, “little progress was made due to lack of political will on the part of government to go through with the promised reforms.”
Quite recently, PricewaterhouseCoopers issued an evaluation report of the reforms concluding that on the whole, the Public Sector Reform Programme “has failed to effectively manage many of the more fundamental issues and problems facing the public service, such as low salary, corruption and poor delivery of public services.”
Two years after the maiden introduction of a Minister in charge of Public Sector Reform, similar questions are being asked today. 'Where are the real and perceptible improvements in Ghana’s public sector?’
Paa Kwesi Nduom, however feels that some success has been achieved. Since the creation of a ministry he now wants made permanent by renaming it Public Service Ministry, he sees some paradigm shift “in line with getting it accepted as something that needs to be done long term. It is recognised as something that is necessary if we are to get the pri”vate sector working
He adds, "I can confidently say that we’ve seen improvements in a number of areas. He lists them as including physically, the outside and inside of the Ministries. Most Chief Directors in the past were acting, he says. But today, most of them have been confirmed, allowing them to work with more confidence. Appointments, he claims, are being better observed now. Chief Directors and others at management grades are undergoing training to improve their skills. In the pay structure itself, distortions were removed from the civil service list last year. The Education sector also underwent a similar programme early this year.
He had to concede, though, "We just simply don’t have in the civil service the people with whom to plan, with whom to initiate innovative policies. All the very few good people we work with, we work them so hard and pay them poorly."
The Minister further admits that the situation, in terms of getting some radical actual reform work done, has seen very little change. "It needs to be funded. The reforms need to be put at the centre of central government policy. At the moment we are just scratching the surface," Dr Nduom says.
He points out that "the most difficult issue is in introducing equitable pay and pension." This, he says, has been achieved on paper, through the setting up of the Fair Wages and Salaries Commission. The law which was introduced in Parliament on March 15 this year spent only a record one week before being passed into law, underlining how much legislators recognised its significance.
In the past, wage compression was the order of the day. For example, between 1976 and 1984, public-sector real wages in Ghana declined by 73 percent for unskilled labour and 93 percent for skilled labour. Much of the wage increases in the 1990s was eaten away by inflation. With macro-stability now, the situation is expected to change and time now seen ripe for the deepening of the reforms process.
There is also an exercise to reform the Civil Service law, which has not been virtually touched since the 1970s. Crucial to this, Dr Nduom states, is to introduce meritocracy into the system and strengthen the hands of civil servants, whose structure has suffered over the years under authoritarian regimes through the ‘politicisation’ and neglect of the Civil Service. Political and personal loyalty are still seen as rewarded more than merit.
Dr Nduom also sees effective decentralisation as crucial to the reform process, although that vital aspect falls under the Local Government ministry. The ongoing process now is to bring sectors such as Education, Agriculture and Health under the direct control of the assemblies at the local level, rather than making them responsible directly to Accra. The public sector needs to be further disaggregated and decentralised to make units more manageable and to increase competition among them.
"There is an enhanced understanding of the need for reform," Dr Nduom assures. The task is in how to improve the public sector to ensure that services are designed around the needs of users. The Minister says a crucial part of the reform work has to do with standardisation - delivering services to uniformly high standards across the country.
For example, only this year has the data on Births & Deaths Registry started being computerised!
E-government may seem costly. Yet, Government has no option for efficiency. A major task is to design and implement "a standard ICT system for public sector administration," says Dr Nduom.
But, as one observer said of a similar exercise in far away UK, when it comes to public sector reforms, "There is no drama in delivery …only a long, grinding haul punctuated by public frustration with the pace of change."
The issue has been the willingness of Governments to tolerate failure and contain mediocrity.
As the Economic Commission for Africa observed in 2004, many African countries such as Ethiopia, Ghana, Mauritius, Senegal and Uganda, have embarked on comprehensive reforms aimed at improving the quality of life of their citizens, and creating new government machineries to establish efficient and effective management systems. However, despite the tremendous efforts and resources allocated to reforms, little progress has been made, and many African countries have not come close to their goal of developing and transforming their societies to the same standards as developed countries. With a few exceptions of successful cases (Botswana, for example), public service management remains at a lethargic stage.
Corruption remains for most of our countries, by far one of the biggest challenges in the public sector. Other challenges include multiple accountability, inadequate resource utilisation and institutional capacity.
Under Jerry John Rawlings various ‘reforms’ of the public sector were undertaken. According to Francis Owusu, a planning expert, the reforms between the 1980s and early 1990s were undertaken as a part of the economic reforms policies that were implemented across the continent; therefore it focused exclusively on trimming the size of the Government, through retrenchment, cost recovery and privatisation. "Although it succeeded in reducing the government wage bills, it did not improve the performance of the public sector. One reason for the ineffectiveness of the policy was that it was too narrow," and also lacked government commitment.
In 1994, the government changed the focus of public sector reforms with the creation of the National Institutional Renewal Programme and the launching of the Civil Service Performance Improvement Programme. Yet, none of these nomenclatures managed to enhance the public sector’s accountability and performance framework and their relationship with the private sector and civil society. More is expected under the present government, though.
Autor(en)/Author(s): Asare Otchere-Darko
Quelle/Source: The Statesman Online, 30.04.2007
