President Akufo-Addo
“I made it clear that I will not countenance any acts of disloyalty or subversion of their respective Ministers, for I will take such acts as disloyalty to me, and, by inference, disloyalty to the Party and the State.
“Any Deputy, who thinks the route to advancement lies in your ability to subvert or undermine your Minister, will be sadly mistaken. You will not profit from that conduct in Akufo-Addo’s presidency”.
President Akufo-Addo is in no doubt ready to whip bad appointees into line as he bestows the arduous task of public office into their hands. There could not have been better expressions from a President in a hurry to change a malfunctioning country into one with her systems at full throttle.
He has never been so resolute, through expression, about his readiness to deal with deviant public officers whose passion for insubordination could constitute spanners in the wheels of the state machinery.
With appointees already in place, many of them serving under superior officers such as ministers, the tendency as rightly observed by the President, is for some to indulge in undermining of their bosses and petty gossips; empirical evidence from previous political orders have shown. This is what the President is warning against.
If the President has no appetite for such frivolous pastimes which can only be indulged in by idle appointees whoever resorts to that inappropriate line should suffer the prescribed sanctions as would be spelt out by the man at the helm.
Only bad leaders countenance such anomalous tendencies from their appointees and the President’s warning shows his depth of experience in governance at the top.
It has generally been held that the genesis of bad governance is leadership. Bad leaders do not only listen to petty gossips and acts of disloyalty from subordinates but encourage them openly and subtly. This is what President Akufo-Addo has shown he is not ready to countenance. We do not have any good reason to disagree with him as are others too who understand such matters of governance and leadership, of course.
Such distractions from the very serious business of making the country work again after a long spell of stagnation and bad governance must be met with the full force at the disposal of the President.
There is no better time to warn the appointees especially the deputies than now when the excitement about the glitters of their new offices is high. Even as they set to work at their desks let them remember the ominous words that they risk suffering telling sanctions should they veer off the path of exhibiting maximum loyalty to the State, the President and their party – the latter being supreme. Anything short of this amounts to insubordination to the state; the sanctions of which should be uncompromising.
The distracters are devious and are ready to play on the insubordination of appointees to their superiors as their unwelcome contribution towards slowing the speed of the government machinery to their political advantage.
A lot of things are at stake and the President whose mission of changing the trend of affairs won him the hearts of most Ghanaians would be incurring the wrath of the electorate if he treats such negative traits with kids’ gloves. Therein lies the goodness of his warning which must be undertaken to the letter when the circumstances demand it.
Leadership is about many attributes, one of which is being ready to deal drastically with breaches of standard conduct of public officials.