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General News of Wednesday, 3 May 2006

Source: The Heritage

Reshuffle is a trial & error strategy ? Gen. Mosquito

The recent cabinet reshuffle by the President Kufuor, continues to attract both negative and positive remarks by supporters of both New Patriotic Party(NPP) and the National Democratic Congress(NDC) with the General Secretary of the latter firing the latest missile.

In an interview yesterday, Johnson Asiedu Nketiah, a.k.a General Mosquito described the reshuffle by the President as a signal by ?trial and error? amateurish government.

?Apart from the cost to the nation, it sends a signal of a trial and error type of governance the NPP government is practicing because when you take over the reigns of government, you can be excused for doing things during your first year - apparently you may or may not think that the structures that exist would help you to execute your manifesto so you may change the structures?, he said.

Arguing further, he said even before such changes are made, the government should have considered them thoroughly and found out that the new structure put in place can do exactly what is expected to do done. But according to him, if a government continues to emerge and separate ministries in its six years of its mandated eight year term in office, it depicts how incompetent such administration is.

?The way the NPP has approached these issue is to say the very least very amateurish? where every cabinet reshuffle comes with the creation and merger of ministries - this indeed does not augur well for our democracy? with the current system since it is going to create more problems?, he observed.

According to him, with this current reshuffle, the President has decided to cancel the Ministry of Youth from the entire ministries.

?Obviously, two thirds of the populace are made up of the youth and most of the problems in this country can be classified as problems of the youth because we have unemployment the highest among the youth, drug abuse, crime and even brain drain so you see the issues are major on every government agenda?, he stressed.

General Mosquito said it would have been better to create a separate ministry for the youth and not to scrap it and rather create a ministry for aviation with what he described as one jumbo jet being managed by a bungling airline. He said when the NDC had a Ministry of Transport, it encompassed Railway and Aviation and yet it was still one of the smallest ministries and functioned well too.

He however suggested the creation of a Ministry of Water Resources so that the works could be put under one ministry with irrigation so that managing water and its utilization could make sense. However, Mr. Asiedu Nketiah agreed that the framers of the 1992 constitution did not find it necessary to force the President to explain to the people why he or she had fired a minister since it would have tied the hands of the President but suggested that if the President would want to avoid speculation, he could come out with explanation since the absence of information creates avenue for speculation.