CSIR is a gold mine - Director General

Bunso(E/R), Sept. 7, GNA - The Director General of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research(CSIR), Prof Owusu Benuah has reminded staff of his outfit that the Council was sitting on a rich gold mine and, therefore, called for support of the staff to enable the Council to tap into the resources for the development of the Council. He observed that, there was no way the Government alone could provide all the funding required by the Council to do everything that the Council wished to pursue and, therefore, the Council needed to do more to generate more funds to fulfil its mandate and pay themselves better.

Prof Benuah was speaking at the formal opening of the National Delegates Conference of the CSIR Senior Staff Association at Bunso on Thursday.

The three-day conference is being organized under the theme: "Raising Internally Generated Fund through Research Commercialization at CSIR - The Role of the Senior Staff". He said for the first two quarters of this year, the Council had been able to generate six billion cedis out of which 85 per cent was being kept by the various institutions under the Council to support their activities.

Prof. Benuah said the Council had signed an agreement with a Malaysian company based in the United Kingdom for the development of high yielding oil palm, which all the money generated from local sales of the product would be taken by the Council while it would share the foreign earnings from the project with the company.

Prof Benuah said the Council was also negotiating with other private companies in the country for the development of other technologies for industrial development to raise funds. He said the Management of the Council had started discussions on the review of the conditions of service of all employees of the Council and expressed the hope that the review could be achieved by the end of the year.

The Minister of Education, Science and Sports, Prof Dominic Fobih observed that, the Government would be encouraged to respond positively to the request for upward adjustment of subventions of the Council only if it realized the proper utilization of the Internally Generated Funds(IGF) of the Council.

He, therefore, called on the Director General of CSIR to strengthen its internal audit system to ensure that every internally generated fund was properly accounted for.

Prof Fobih urged the delegates to make a critical review of their role in research in their various institutes and fashion out strategies to improve upon them.

The Deputy Eastern Regional Minister, Mr Ofosu Asamoah reminded staff of the Council that nations that were regarded as industrialized started from circumstances that might have been worse than where Ghana found it self today but with determination, hard work and focus, they had become successful in addressing most of the basic needs of their societies He called on the staff to develop the "can do attitude" towards the challenges that confronted the country and the country would never fail. The Commercial Director of CSIR, Mrs Josephine Okutu called for a new methodology for the calculation of the IGF of CSIR to include the capturing of the contributions of CSIR to the socio-economic contributions of the Council to the national economy.

She observed that, unless that methodology was developed, the Council would continue to delude itself into believing that by its inability to meet the demand for 30 per cent contribution of its annual budgetary requirement through its IGF, the Council was not relevant and would provide the ammunition for others to unjustly accuse the Council of being a waste-pipe to Government expenditure.

Earlier in a welcoming address, the National President of the Senior Staff Association of CSIR, Mr Sampson Asirifi called on the delegates to consider the turning of the Association into a trade union because experience had shown that the Management in the country never took negotiations on conditions of service for their staff serious if it did not involve the unions.

He said the conditions of service of the senior staff of the council had not been reviewed for a long time and complained that often when it came to negotiations of issues affecting the staff of the technology grades, the Management of the Council took uncompromising stance and appealed to the Management of the council to reconsider their position.