Dr. Gideon Boako
Technical Advisor and Spokesperson for the Vice President, Dr. Gideon Boako, has stated that the new digital system put in place by the government will make life easy and improve the standard of living of Ghanaians.
He said even though it would take some time for the full benefits of digitalisation to manifest, thing are beginning to get better.
“It is making it possible for you to check whether or not the car you want to buy is insured, buy your electricity units irrespective of your location or time of the day,” he noted at a press conference held at the New Patriotic Party (NPP) Headquarters last Friday.
According to him, when the e-pharmacy is done it will afford every resident in Ghana the chance to find which pharmacy has the prescribed drug and whether it is FDA approved or not with ease.
Dr. Boako said the digital infrastructure being laid would also make it possible for all, particularly rural settlers to apply for government scholarships without travelling to Accra.
“It is making it possible for taxi and Okada riders to pick any customer and receive payments irrespective of the telecommunication company they have their mobile money accounts with,” he stressed.
He indicated that it had taken political will on the part of the ruling NPP government to put these new systems in place, taking away the “decades of systems that are malfunctioned, regressive, and inefficient” since they did not fit for modern day living.
He pointed out that the innovations made offer “little immediate political benefit, saying, “It takes some time for the full benefits of digitalisation to become obvious to many and manifest in our lives.”
“Politicians generally cannot afford to wait. The infrastructure we have put in place for digitalisation is soft infrastructure. It is not like a road or a bridge you can point to. But it is a powerful and an expanded highway for development,” Dr. Boako intimated.
He said Ghana’s digitisation agenda fits well into President Akufo-Addo’s vision of building a modern Ghanaian economy anchored on digital technology.
“The current political leadership led by President Akufo-Addo is showing the needed interest and commitment to create a modern Ghanaian economy that can compete favourably globally and conform to the dictates of the fourth industrial revolution.”
“Undoubtedly, the global development paradigm is moving, some may argue it has moved, from the industrial age into the technology and information age,” he stated.
For him, this transition is coming with its own transition terms – such as e- commerce, e-procurement, e-marketing, e -business and electronic money.
“Not to be left behind is e-governance in the public sector, which is our focus this afternoon, and with it comes all the others earlier mentioned,” the Vice President’s Spokesperson noted.
He asserted that in nearly five years, the government had been pursuing an aggressive digitisation and digitalisation agenda by using ICT as a tool to achieve better governance.
“The overarching objective is to get government public institutions to use ICT to enhance their ways and means of linking with the general public in ways to reduce costs, improve performance, increase ease of access and speed of delivery and effectiveness.”
“It is about how the government organises itself – its administration, rules and regulations and frameworks to coordinate and perform public administration,” he added.
Bureaucratic Hurdles
He said for many post-colonial societies like Ghana that appear stacked in the old antiquated ways of doing things, technological innovations and digitisation are just what is needed to “leapfrog years of public administration reforms” that have almost become a never-ending business, in some cases even more bureaucratic, more red-tape, more opaque and impediments to doing business.”
“Much of the public sector administration which this government inherited was actually set up as instruments of governance of the people by the ruling class. It is a rigid public sector, unbending, centralised and in many ways slow in responding to public needs.”
“And, I must say the majority of the public administration systems even as of today are pretty much the same, despite the interventions we are seeing. They all have to be fixed now,” he pinned.
By Ernest Kofi Adu