Handing over notes: Make Chief Directors liable – IEA

The Presidential Transition Act will need to be reviewed to empower chief directors of the various ministries to take control of the preparations of handing over notes of outgoing ministers before the 7th of November in every election year, Dr Michael Ofori-Mensah, a senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), has said.

According to him, once the chief directors are made aware that they will be held liable for the absence of handing over notes before the deadline, they would speed up the preparations of such documents to avert some of the challenges that have characterised the transitional period in the country.

Speaking in an interview with Emefa Apawu on 505 programme on Class 91.3FM on Tuesday March 14 after a roundtable discussion on the Transition Act, Dr Ofori-Mensah said: “We have presented a paper with responses from stakeholders. We have also taken on board some of the submissions that have come out today and we will go back, rewrite it, and invite stakeholders to again review it and then put it in the form of a draft amendment bill to the transition act and then we will submit it to the Attorney General (Gloria Akuffo). From there, we are hoping that she will also forward it to cabinet and eventually to parliament to be worked on.

“One key issue has to do with the handing over notes, which are very crucial for the running of government machinery. The consensus is that some punitive measures should be put in place and of course ministers provide policy guidelines so we are thinking about putting the punitive measures on the chief directors in the ministries and they can be sanctioned by their heads who do not prepare the notes.

“So we are going to form some sort of sanctions because they prepare these notes for the ministers to sign and we can get their heads – be it the local government service head or the head of the civil service to sanction them if this is not prepared by November 7th of an election year as a way of resolving some of the issues that have come up.”