Ministers Appraisal Needless, Give Them Money to Work – Minority

Members of the Minority side in Parliament have raised concerns about the President’s intended assessment of the performance of his  ministers.

Speaking at a press conference on Friday, Minority Leader, Haruna Iddrisu, said the assessment was not necessary because some of the ministries are struggling due to lack of funds.

He added that, any attempt to give them enough funding for their work will go a long way in boosting the performance of the ministers in the discharge of their duties.

“The president was generous in heaping adulation of praises on a handful of appointees and left out many hardworking of his ministers in other enterprises who are struggling to work with financial resources and financial releases from the Ministry of Finance. So if you say you are going to evaluate ministers to achieve what? They don’t just have the money,” he said.

The Majority Leader further noted that, information available to them suggests that some of the ministries in 2017 received as low as 25% of their budgetary allocation, and thus could not operate at optimum capacity as expected of them.

He added that only the Flagstaff House had consistent releases.

“Detailed releases as we saw in 2017 were between 25.9 to 38 percent, at best was 40 percent except office of government machinery and the Flagstaff House which had reasonable releases to that outfit,” Haruna Iddrisu added.

President assesses ministers on Monday

The President is expected to assess his ministers on Monday to ascertain how they performed during his first year in office.

Reports in the media suggest that the President will have face-to-face conversations with each of his appointees during the assessment exercise.

Monitoring and Evaluation minister defends appraisal

Meanwhile, the Minister for Monitoring and Evaluation, Dr. Anthony Akoto Osei, has justified the upcoming exercise by the President. According to him, the exercise is well within the purview of the President as the appointing authority.

Speaking to journalists on Friday, he indicated that, he will even be assessed as the Monitoring and Evaluation Minister by the President.

“As you do your things you need to assess yourself to see where you are going so I think it’s necessary. A year down the line it’s important that the President who is the appointing authority will have a one-on-one discussion with his appointees. We are not interested in their [Minority’s] preference. They are not in government so their preferences do not matter. When they say the ministries do not have money to work with, what do they mean by that?”

“Ministries are operating. We have to cut our coat to our size; we don’t want to exceed the appropriations act which is illegal which they did in 2015. It is crucially important for the president to independently have a conversation with his appointees to see the way forward. Maybe because they [NDC] did not do enough of that so that is why they could not see what was going on,” he added.

Source: Citifmonline