New Ghanaian

Governance and Democratic Delivery

Papa Badu Donkoh

Editor

17 November 2012

Security Services

Armed Forces

  • Promote and maintain and professionalised non-partisan & competent forces that is able to confront the growing threat to national security from terrorism, regional violence & disputes, national relief emergencies, territorial integrity and oil reserves
  • Armed forces to focus on their universal remit (nation security and emergences), and not allowed into any political, economic or commercial activity
  • Maintain a Special Forces unit – make it competent and specialist unit, as in UK (SAS) & USA (Navy Seals)

Police Service

  • Strengthen capacity and competence of service to confront current and future challenges: terrorism, high technology crimes, drugs trafficking, sophisticated armed robbery etc
  • Continued professional development to be made obligatory for all officers and made an essential condition for promotion.
  • Establish defined career track with clearly spelt out salary and career grading scales, requirements for career grades and promotions, and rewards for each grade on the career track. This will make the profession transparent, accountable and minimise any hint of favouritism or nepotism
  • Establish an Independent Police Authority (IPA) to investigate complaints, malpractices and review activities and performance of services. Members will be appointed by the Public Services Commission. The IPA will publish annual reports on its activities and make them available to the public.
  • Invest in information technology and digitise police records – to coordinate activities of stations, keep records, and speed investigations and intelligence gathering

Council of State

  • Maintain current format – elections and appointments – plus nominations from political parties.
  • Nominated political party persons to be approved by independent body to ensure they are of sound character – same criteria for Member of Parliament
  • Criteria for party nominations (proportional representation): parties with 5% – 19% of vote nominate 1 person; 20& – 39% nominate 2 persons; 40% – 59% nominate 3 persons; 60% – 79% nominate 4 persons; 80% – 100% nominate 5 persons.

Office of the President

  • Establish units for policy & strategy, and delivery,  headed and staffed by competent people
  • Policy & strategy unit to formulate and help with implementing government policy & strategy for ministries and departments – in consultation with ministers and department heads
  • Delivery unit responsible for overseeing delivery of policies and strategies plus monitoring, reviewing and evaluating achievement of policies of ministries, departments and public agencies in consultation with ministers, department heads and boards and management of public agencies. Delivery unit will publish annual reports of its reviews and make them available to the public (online).
  • Policy & strategy unit to publish annual policy & strategy documents and action plans of ministries and public departments
  • Delivery unit to publish annual assessment of ministries, department and public agencies

Traditional Authorities’ Involvement

  • Traditional authorities to maintain the non-partisan stance, as stipulated in the constitution.
  • Make traditional authorities (paramount chiefs) ceremonial heads of district assemblies. Where there is more than one paramount chief in a district the ceremonial headship will rotate among the paramount chiefs every 2 years. Where there is one paramount chief for more than one district the queen mother will take up the ceremonial headship in one of the districts.
  • Regional heads of house of chiefs will be regional ceremonial heads.
  • Ceremonial heads will not have executive functions but have ceremonial duties including opening and closing assemblies, receiving dignitaries and other duties as may be agreed by the assembly
  • Head of national house of chiefs will continue to be a member of council of state
  • These proposals will not be implemented until the house of chiefs sort out all disputes pending before it and provide a clear action plan for sorting out future disputes.

Dual Citizenship Support

  • Promote dual citizenship among Ghanaians abroad
  • Ghanaians abroad and dual citizens to be allowed to vote in selected countries. Voting centres to be trailed in UK, USA and Canada
  • Dual citizens to be eligible to be appointed and stand for election to all state offices (as in UK and most European countries) except office of president
  • Dual citizens have lived and been educated in the countries that pull the strings with global players – have the confidence to negotiate and deal on par with these global players/ counterpart to secure better deals for the country. Consider countries like Czech Republic, Israel, Estonia, Lutthiania, Georgia where many of their state and business people officials are dual US citizens
  • They understand and are familiar with the present hyper- connective world & nuanced global interactions and can leverage their skills, familiarity and experience to advance the national interest in dealings and negotiations with foreign /global players – as done in Georgia

Appointment of Ministers of State & District Chief Executives

  • Requirements for majority of ministers to be appointed from parliament to be removed to give president freedom to appointment competent people from both parliament and outside
  • District executives to be elected on partisan basis – strengthen democracy, accountability and inclusiveness of minority parties

Audit Commission

  • Establish an audit authority or commission to conduct annual performance assessments and audits of districts assemblies to ensure accountability, quality delivery of public policy, and value for money, especially when district chief executive are to be elected. Poor performing districts will be sanctioned. The reports of the commission will be available to the public annually (online).
  • This body will be separate from the district assemblies common fund authority, which will concentrate on allocation of funds to assemblies
  • Allocation of funds to MPs from the common fund will be stopped.

Judgement Debts/Payments

  • Establish cross party commission to review all national debt judgements, payments, current processes for payment and settlement, and recommend sound practices for contract, negotiations and settlements and ways to limit/prevent involvement in future debt payments.

Legal and Investigative Services

  • Strength capacity and competencies of CHRAJ and SFO by giving them the essential resources and facilities
  • Heads of investigative state bodies such as CHRAJ and SFO will have 5 years non-renewable fixed term mandate and will neither be accountable to parliament or the executive
  • Separate attorney general post ( to promote independence and limit conflict of interest) from minister of justice
  • Establish a national prosecution service with decentralised district offices to speed up prosecutions and ensure fair and swift justice delivery

Creating Efficient Public Sector & Effective Public Services

  • Public agencies and department will be made autonomous
  • Public agencies and department boards will be appointed by a public appointments board
  • Public agencies and department boards and chief executives will sign performance charter and be held accountable for delivering functions of their agencies and achievements of the agencies targets/plans
  • Put in place skilled management and governance: use rigorous & effective talent and skills recruitment & retention of managers– use incentives including comparable pay and performance enhancements as in Singapore
  • Use performance enhancing tools & bench mark practices with private sector productivity and efficiency, as started by Sweden in its reforms in late 1990’s. The policy, strategy & delivery unit will monitor progress and spread good ideas and practices
  • Actively involve stakeholders including selling shares to the public in non-  utility state enterprises & encourage formation of consumer interest groups
    Separate  design & provision of public services ( design by executive  unit & delivered by state corporation or department).  Some EU countries including UK & Sweden have separated design from provision. Executive unit has become the architect  – finance & specify costs & levels of certain services for state departments to deliver. Delivery could be done by multiple players (charities, private companies, state enterprises, private-public partnerships) with same level of service agreements, which encourages competition, choice and quality services.
  •  Government ministries can then concentrate on policy development (strategy) while state departments/corporations focus on delivery (operations) & held accountable for delivery standards & performance, as per service performance and delivery agreements

State Media & Others

  • Ghana Broadcasting Corporation (GBC) to maintain its remit as the public broadcaster with a mission to inform, educate and entertain; and modelled along the lines of BBC
  • GBC to be funded by TV licence fees and placement advertisement. TV licence to be made mandatory for all households with TV.
  • Commercial advertisement except placement advertisement will not be allowed on GBC. This help private broadcaster to expand and be competitive
  • National private broadcasters will be obliged to reserve certain hours of prime time and non-primetime for public interest activities including news and current affairs
  • The GBC board will ensure that it delivers it public mission remit, quality programmes and effective use of its resources
  • State newspapers will be divested.
  • National Media Commission (NMC) will be strengthened to make to ensure freedom of the media and fair reporting. The NMC will have full statutory responsibility to promote and protect freedom of speech and the responsibilities of the media – to ensure that freedom of speech is not threatened by the state, media owners and powerful individuals.  The NMC will have a framework (signed by all media organisations) that covers how the media is supervised, media abuses are investigated, sanctions for abuses, and also defences for the media to fulfil their responsibilities.
  • No organisation or individual will be allowed to own or partially own a more than national television station, national radio or newspaper at the same time or a combination of two national media outlets. This will help ensure plurality and responsibility of our media.

De-cluttering, Regional Development, Regeneration & Integration

  • Relocate and spread major government departments and enterprises across the country. Relocation will depend on reasonableness, rationality,  ease of relocation and of doing business. For example because of current better transport linkages bewteen the big cities – Kumasi, Kofridua, Accra, Takoradi, Cape Coast, Ho – relocation should not be hard. It will be trailed in these cities.
  • Private sector will be incentivise to spread locations – move their headquaters to other parts of the country
  • Benefit – social ( cultural & social integration), economic (cost savings, regeneration, boost other regions gross value added – measure of output)