President John Dramani Mahama has denied reports of an impending massive retrenchment exercise in the public sector due to demands by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout conditions.
There have been speculations that the IMF’s programme with Ghana will result in massive job cuts in the public sector.
The Trade Union Congress (TUC) has strongly warned that it will resist any attempt to lay off workers in the public sector.
However, delivering a keynote address at the 8th Conference of the Public Service Chief Directors and Chair Persons of governing boards and Council, President Mahama said the reports are untrue.
“I’ve heard it said that under the IMF programme we have just entered government intends to retrench workers as part of the conditionality of the IMF, I wish to say that this is absolutely false,” said President Mahama adding that “there is no condition in the IMF that asks us to retrench workers.”
Recruitment into public sector
He went on further to say that the growing perception that recruitment into the public service has been stopped is not accurate.
He said “government is not halting employment into the public services either,” and that “we will continue to employ the numbers that we need, that is the difference.”
The President explained that what government intends to do is to stagger the recruitment and by that, coordinate it, to ensure there is no mass recruitment into the public sector.
“We can’t do a whole sale employment into the public services even if we don’t need them and employing people who have no work to do in the organizations.”
Staff rationalization
President Mahama said government is embarking on a massive “staff rationalization process that is yielding good results.”
Citing the educational sector as one of the beneficiaries of the staff rationalization initiative, President Mahama said government had posted over 13,000 teachers to teach in very deprived areas that needed such services.
“That is part of the problem we have with our public services, we have a concentration of professionals in some areas and lack of professionals in some areas, we cannot continue to have that. There are teachers needed in the rural areas and yet all the teachers are in the urban centres.” “And so we are moving to a system under the decentralisation where eventually vacancies will be declared at the district level.
If there are no vacancies in the cities, sorry, if you want to work, you must go where the vacancies are,” he added.
Credit: citifmonline