Former Rector of the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration (GIMPA), Prof Stephen Adei, has suggested that Ministers of state hire five-member teams of experts to help them deliver on their expected tasks.

“I personally think that a typical minister should be allowed to come with five experts whom he would go with,” he said at the Accra Dialogue IV on Wednesday, 30 May 2018.

The dialogue is a discussion on issues and challenges surrounding the Civil Service of Ghana.

For the past few weeks, the Civil and Local Government Staff Association of Ghana (CLOGSAG) has been complaining that their members have been sidelined by the Ministers who have replaced the civil servants with cronies as Special Assistants, but Prof Adei noted that political appointees should “appreciate that no presidential appointee or ministerial appointee can ever take over the whole functions of the whole civil service.”

He advised CLOGSAG not to get worried when Ministers appoint political aides outside the civil service.

A former Chief of Staff in the John Agyekum Kufuor administration, Kwadwo Mpiani, who also justified the appointment of persons outside the civil service, said: “Even if a president decides to bring in only advisors from outside, these advisors need the civil service to help them to perform…we must allow the president also to bring in the people he believes will help him in his management of the affairs of the state.”