CEPA Challenges Statistical Service

By J. Ato Kobbie, Managing Editor

The Centre for Policy Analysis (CEPA) has challenged the Ghana statistical Service (GSS) to initiate a process towards getting the country data on employment, to enable the country plan more effectively in addressing the problem of unemployment in the country.

“It is a serious charge on us as a nation that we do not know the number of people that are getting employed, to know whether that number is going up or down, much less to talk about under-employment or unemployment,” Dr. Joe Abbey, Executive Director of CEPA stated, adding that “That is a very serious charge on us.”

Speaking to The Business Analyst in Accra, after launching a Special Edition of its annual economic review and outlook, The Dawn of the Oil Era, Dr. Abbey said it was important that data in that area was gathered starting with ‘modern’ organizations.

Dr. Abbey said as important as this was, however, it would not be done if the necessary pressure was not mounted on the GSS and resourced to do so. He said the lack of concrete data in the area of employment also “betrays the fact that we have not been trying to properly assess what price a country like ours may have to pay to achieve the objectives of macro-economic stability in the short run.”

“We should be interested in the potential job losses or jobs that don’t get created because we are very busily trying to restrain spending,” Dr. Abbey insisted, continuing that even though the restraint on spending may be necessary, however, somebody pays for it.

“Somebody’s spending is cut out; somebody’s benefit from government spending is cut out; somebody’s job is not generated,” Dr. Abbey elaborated, continuing that “we should have the social conscience to ask whether the right people are being used by us to fight the inflation war.”

He said doing that was not about tolerating inflation, but an issue of “burden sharing and the minimum is for us to own up that there is a youth unemployment that has gone up and so on”.

The CEPA boss said it was regrettable that the Minister for Employment and Social Welfare, Mr. E. T. Mensah, once made a presentation in Parliament and it emerged that the employment figures that he quoted were not measured but projections by some people.

“It is a serious problem for the country,” Dr. Abbey emphasized, cautioning that “attempts to build macro-economic stability on the basis of socio-political instability, is not likely to succeed!”

“This is why we have to make a national call on the Ghana Statistical Service that we would like them, working maybe with the SSNIT (Social Security and National Insurance Trust), to generate data for employment trends, even if only in the modern sector,” saying, “It is doable!”

He said this would mean that apart from the public service workers, those in enterprises under umbrella bodies such as the Association of Ghana Industries (AGI), Ghana Chamber of Commerce (GCC), and the Ghana Chamber of Mines (GCM) and others that lobby government for various benefits and advantages must be used in assembling such data.

e-mail: j.atokobbie@yahoo.com