Slashing ministries may receive praise but the elephant in the room is the civil service

Five days after assuming office, President John Mahama reduced the number of ministries from 29 to 23, in line with his pledge to appoint no more than 60 ministers. However, a careful look at Ghana’s governance structure and history shows that this civil service restructure by the President is superficial if painful decisions are not made about Ghana’s bureaucratic governance system.

The President’s ambitious target to “reset” this country will need an energetic, responsible and professional civil service. Needless to say, an effective bureaucracy is essential for public service delivery, which in turn, affects productivity across all relevant sectors. However, if it is ran as it has been for the past decades, I’m convinced that the sun would set on President John Mahama’s tenure without shining.

This is because the issues around the efficiency of Ghana’s bureaucracy have been an everlasting conundrum that every single regime, since imperial Britain purported to have left our shores and affairs, have struggled to find solutions to. The conditions, ethnic and political patronage, that have shaped the current image of the civil service are precolonial, colonial and post-independent contentions.

The power dynamics of our precolonial setting was a patron-client relationship. Patrons, such as chiefs, rulers and wealthy individuals dished out benefits to the common people, who in turn, offered loyalty and service.

All the colonialists had to do to exploit this relationship was to co-opt the chiefs and burgeoning elite with a stable source of income. The latter patronised their supporters with the wealth gained, while suppressing dissenters or perceived detractors. This solidified the gap between the elite and the common people in the then Gold Coast.

Although newly independent Ghana had been largely successful in Africanising the civil service, the merit-based bureaucracy that the colonial administration had tried to establish, when it was about to hand over power, suffered greatly.

Initially, Dr Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first president, was sure there was a need to dismantle the master-servant civil service created by the colonialists in order for the “African project” to succeed.

This intention, which I think was pure, was eclipsed by the need for disloyal bureaucrats to be eradicated from the civil service. Nkrumah made this point succinctly in I Speak of Freedom that “disloyal civil servants are no better than saboteurs.” His regime, although having pure intentions, delivered a heavy blow on the civil service as he co-opted some bureaucrats into the Kwame Nkrumah Ideological Institute. The bureaucracy under his government prioritised loyalty over merit-based personnel which affected the service’s efficiency.  

The majority of the civil service resisted Nkrumah’s efforts to inculcate his ideas into the bureaucracy. He asserted in his book, “Dark Days in Ghana”, after he had been ousted, that the civil service had derailed his socialist programme.

The topsy-turvy political scene that followed Ghana and Africa’s loss of Nkrumah’s regime, would further worsen the situation of the civil service.

An important incident in the administration of the Prime Minister of the Second Republic, Dr Abrefa Busia, cannot be glossed over. The lead up to the elections that ushered in that republic, probably, is the source of the Akan-Ewe contentions that has characterised present Ghanaian political and social life. The leading contenders of that election, Dr Busia and K.A. Gbedemah, belonged to the mentioned ethnic groups respectively.  Ethnic sentiments were whipped during the campaign.

In the early days of Busia’s administration, 568 civil servants were discharged under the 1969 Constitutional transition provisions. It was widely believed that the downsizing was due to the perceived notion that Ewes were more represented in the senior level civil servants. Critics said the decision was aimed at “getting rid” of civil servants deemed to be against Busia’s government and to patronise the base of the United Party.

With the precedent of a supposed “ethnic cleansing” set, the decline of the civil service into an abyss of a polarised and inefficient group was exacerbated by the economic challenges the country faced in the 70s and 80s. The service could just not pull its weight; it lacked capacity and had become a vestige of corruption.

The civil service, therefore, did not escape the probity and accountability frenzy of the Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC).

The PNDC junta partly blamed the civil service for the woes of the state and described them as an “agent of imperialism and neo-colonialism”.

But the PNDC’s solutions didn’t help matters. The regime established organs such as the People’s Defence Committees and Workers’ Defence Committees across the country to help formulate and implement policies. However, the “spirit and letter” of these organs “smacked of patronage in both character and policy”, not different from previous regimes.

The Fourth Republic has not deviated much from this posturing. If anything has changed, it is the entrenchment of the leaders of ministries being political principals and the shackling of technocrats. In fact, it would not be farfetched to say that political heads have planted patronage, where seeds of professionalism and patriotism were to be sowed in the civil service.

It is no wonder that since 1957, there has been over 28 initiatives to reform the country’s bureaucracy. Regardless of our appreciation of the need to have a robust civil service, these reform attempts have been unsatisfactory.

A 2019 research paper that set out to assess how Ghana’s civil service code of conduct is being operationalized, found that the master-servant relations of yore is still prevalent. When senior management staff violate the code of conduct, they are barely punished while junior staff are often used as scapegoats. Nepotism, favouritism, ethnic and political interferences are rife, creating a deadlock in the productivity and efficiency of the civil service.

It is clear that unless bold and decisive measures are taken to solve these entrenched issues, it will be very difficult for any government to effectively and efficiently implement its policies.

The many reforms that we have obtained funding to implement, but have been unable to see them through satisfactorily, are starting points. Most importantly, we can’t run away from the urgent need to reduce the number of civil servants. A civil service reform in 1997 under the late President John Rawlings made nonsense of the idea of a real reform because staff were reduced in some ministries and later subsumed into other government agencies.

President Mahama has slashed seven ministries. If the staff of these redundant ministries, especially those without any specific and needed skills, are merely absolved into the public sector, it would be worsening the padding of the civil service. After a thorough cleansing of the bureaucracy, professional management training, clear performance targets and a rationalization of salary and grading system must be instituted.

A lot more must be done to wring out the juice in our civil servants. I’m not sure if four years would be enough. But a deviation from the norm takes a decision. If President Mahama does not make the needed decisions to thoroughly reform our civil service but trudge on the usual path of political and ethnic patronisation, which has undoubtedly brought us to this end, we would be jeopardising the gains of the Fourth Republic.