Special assistants "for sale"!

Last Tuesday, on Radio Gold, Johnson “General Mosquito” Asiedu-Nketiah, NDC MP for Wenchi West, caught the NPP flat-footed when he confirmed an interview he had granted the Heritage newspaper to the effect that the too many Special Assistants in the NPP Government were simply a “jobs for the boys” strategy of appointing persons with ministerial perks without designating them Ministers in order not to appear to have exceeded the number of Ministers that the NDC Government had.

Earlier, Jake “Goebbels” Obetsebi-Lamptey, in answer to a Parliamentary Question at the end of last year, informed Parliament that there were in all 27 Special Assistants in the NPP System. He did not name them, but gave an account of their Conditions of Service, which were almost the same as those of Ministers or at work Deputy Ministers.

Around the same time, President Kufuor was “confessing” at a Press Conference that his criticism of the number of NDC Ministers when he was in opposition was made out of ignorance and naivety.

All of those point to only one conclusion - the NPP has many, many more Ministers and Special Assistants than the NDC could ever have dreamt of having. But the important revelation about the NPP Special Assistants is that there is nothing special about them.

They do not have any special qualifications, they do not have any unique experiences, they would not qualify to be anywhere near the positions they occupy if they had entered the Civil Service through regular channels.

The so-called Special Assistants are mainly returnees from the USA where they were either taxi drivers or limousine chauffeurs, or close friends and chums of the Ministers with either ordinary first degrees or sometimes no degrees at all.

Their claim to fame is that they helped in the NPP election effort, either by mobilising resources or as part of the Party’s rigging machinery in the last elections. Even though Jake “Goebbels” put their number at 27, Ghana Palaver researchers have identified 37 of such Special Assistants, and the number keeps rising. As is shown in the Table.

“The Ghana Palaver” is yet to establish the identities of the Special Assistants for nine of the Ministers and all of the Regional Ministers except one.

We are also yet to confirm the number and identities of those in the offices of the President and the Vice President. It is significant that for a Government that eats and breathes transparency and wants to introduce a “Freedom of Information Act”, there is so little information forthcoming about the number of and identity of its Special Assistants.

Indeed it is significant that the NPP Government, after two years in office, has nto been able to publish the usual educational pictorial broadcast, “Know Your Ministers – And their Deputies”, except in their case, they will have to add “And Their Special Assistants”.

The Ghana Palaver, by today’s publication is appealing to the general public, especially the Civil Servants who know, to let us know who the unknown Special Assistants are, so that we can publish a true record of the number and identities of the NPP Ministers, Deputy Ministers, and Special Assistants. At least, for the records.