Domelevo urges restructuring of state agencies to tackle wasteful spending

Auditor-General, Daniel Yaw Domelevo has suggested a restructuring of state institutions to ensure efficient and effective service delivery.

To him, many of Ghana’s public service providers are a duplicate of each other, a situation he believes accounts for their poor modes of operations.

Citing the Ghana Education Service (GES) and the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Health (MoH) and Ghana Health Service as examples, he stated that employees at such agencies enjoy taxpayers’ money at the expense of quality service provision when their jobs are being already done by others.

“The issue is that we have too many service [insitutions]. We have Civil Service, Judicial Service, Audit Service, Education Service, Health Service and other several services.  As if that level of centralization is not enough, governments have created several Ministries too. So what is the serious difference between Ghana Education Service and the Ministry of Education? This is just wastage. We have created structures that duplicate roles and by the time we realise, monies meant for development at the district level, are finished. So we need to restructure the public service.”

 

‘Indiscipline affecting quality of work by Ghanaian professionals’

The Auditor-General has in the past bemoaned what he called the decline in the quality of work undertaken by all kinds of Ghanaian professionals.

He said the standards in professions such as accounting, auditing, engineering and vocations such as tailoring and dressmaking have fallen low to the extent that Ghanaians prefer the services of expatriate professional workers.

Mr. Domelevo attributed the worrying trend to lack of discipline of Ghanaian workers.

He explained that, the ‘fundamental’ problem of Ghanaians as it stands now is a lack of discipline.

“The quality of engineering hasn’t improved, the quality of almost everything is going down with more professions. Today, people want to put up a structure and they don’t want a Ghanaian, they are looking for someone else. There is something fundamentally wrong and that thing for me, is lack of discipline,” he said.