Haruna Iddrisu
The President is not happy about how some of his appointees announce government policies without Cabinet approval.
The anomaly is said to have embarrassed government for sometime now and given the gratis ammo this gives to opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) to deal avoidable yet punchy blows to the NDC, the recent warning to the okro mouth ministers is understandable.
Why would ministers for that matter announce critical policy developments when these have not been concluded at Cabinet level?
Is there not in place procedures for such announcements to obviate such embarrassing outcomes?
Whatever the answers to the foregone are, they indicate procedural deficiencies in governance, something which calls for a reset.
The lack of coherence and coordination in the management of government business as being observed is a major defect.
Such drawback at the highest echelon of governance is regrettable, and it is our hope that appropriate efforts would be put in place to reverse the anomaly.
Kojo Oppong Nkrumah had led a Minority in Parliament charge for policy disclosures which had not received the scrutiny of the legislature. This, he said, has robbed Parliament of its supervisory and oversight roles.
Following the warning to ministers and appointees about unauthorised announcements, observers tried to put pieces together in their efforts to find out what the immediate cause of the reaction was. It was a warning which came on the heels of Education Minister Haruna Iddrisu’s policy announcement of a mother tongue project.
The disclosure prompted a national conversation about the project which, as he put it, would be restricted to the formative years of schooling.
While the subject is not new having undergone policy alterations since independence, the minister’s blunder was that he allotted a timing for the adoption of the project.
That kids will better understand subjects such as science and mathematics when they are taught in their mother tongues is something research is said to have supported.
The challenges in implementing such a policy are however too enormous and make an immediate adoption not unwise.
Be it as it may, a roadmap and what it will take to make it feasible should be discussed without delay if a future consideration is on the table.
Some mother tongues such as Ga among others are suffering from dearth of instructors, deficiency which would take long to address.
Rendering existing textbooks especially into the mother tongues is a herculean task which cannot be surmounted overnight.
We think that government’s warning to ministers and appointees coming immediately after the Education Minister’s announcement at Mawuli Senior High School in the Volta Region could have been managed without embarrassing him.