President-elect Nana Akufo-Addo’s mode of naming his appointees is commendable, political communications lecturer at the University of Cape Coast Dr Eric Opoku Mensah and Dr Etse Sikanku, a lecturer at the Ghana Institute of Journalism, have said.
Mr Akufo-Addo has adopted a piecemeal approach in naming who makes it into his ministerial team. He uses occasions to name the ministers.
He has so far named Alan Kyerematen as the Trade Minister-Designate, Professor Kwabena Frimpong Boateng as the Minister-Designate for Science, Environment, Technology and Innovation; Hajia Alima Mahama as Local Government Minister-Designate and Dr Afriyie Akoto as Agriculture Minister-Designate.
His approach is different from the usual norm where past presidents released a tall list of appointees in a press statement.
Speaking in an interview with Emefa Apawu on Class FM’s ‘505’ news analysis programme on Tuesday, 3 January, Dr Opoku Mensah said: “I think that this is a bit unconventional since 1992 with respect to the nomination of people to serve in the respective ministries or portfolios in Ghana.
“I have been wondering why the president-elect is using this particular strategy and what comes to mind is probably that there is a lot of expectation from his incoming government.
“After the elections, different groups in Ghana and everybody was saying that we expect the president to come and give us jobs, to come and work out this ailing economy and to close all the gaps and where the country’s purse is leaking and all of that, so, I think that it behoves the president-elect to assemble the best team to be able to carry out this huge mandate and I think that as part of not making a mistake, he is trying as much as possible to drop these names to elicit a certain response from the different social groups and different civil society groups to be able to get the kind of informal assessment of how the public really sees these nominees,” Dr Opoku Mensah said.
He added: “I suspect that by bringing these names out in succession, it will give him the opportunity to review what the public is saying about these people…so I think it is a very good strategy.”
For his part, Dr Sikanku, also commenting on the same programme, said: “I think Dr Opoku is right in terms of the fact that doing this with the piecemeal approach allows you to elicit some response from the public.”
“When former President John Kufuor took office, one of the first ministers he appointed was the late Kwadwo Baah Wiredu as the Local Government Minister and then a few of them followed afterwards but it did not take this stretch of time. … Then after that the usual thing happened, we had a press release with a list of ministers but he (Akufo-Addo) … dropping the names one after the other might be an effective strategy because what he does … is that he mentions these names when he goes to audiences which are related to the particular sector.”
Source: Ghana/AccraFM.com
