Former Member of Parliament for North Dayi Constituency in the Volta Region George Loh has chastised the Finance Minister’s apology over the wrongful deletion of names of public sector workers from the government payroll.
George Loh says “they could not generate revenue to pay the salaries so they did that to respite but it is good the minister has eaten his humble pie”.
The Finance Minister, Ken Ofori-Atta, on Monday admitted there were some names wrongfully expunged from government’s mechanized payroll as part of government’s bid to rid it of ghost names. “We did an exercise recently in which quite a number of people were taken out of the payroll.
We’ve had some remarks from some unions, but the real question for all of us in the country is that we know that there is some rot in there, we know we need to take some action and in the process of taking the action a few wrong eggs will be broken and we should apologize for that,” the Finance Minister was quoted as saying at the National Policy Forum in Accra.
Reacting to the apologies on TV3’s New Day hosted by Bright Nana Amfo on Tuesday, May 16, lawyer George Loh said “I don’t want to say it was just a mistake but it saved them. It gave them some respite because they could not generate revenue so they did that to [get] some respite”.
He said some workers “demonstrated that they were not ghosts, but they would not listen to them. It is because they did not do proper work”. The National Democratic Congress (NDC) man said stakeholders such as the National Association of Graduate Teachers (NAGRAT) and Ghana National Association of Teachers openly told them their members were not ghosts but the government did not listen to them.
“Schools reopen and people cannot pay their schools fees. Families shortchanged of their daily bread all because of substandard work by the current administration,” the former MP noted.
The National Coordinator of the Nasara Club in the New Patriotic Party (NPP), Kamal Deen Abdulai, who was also on the programme, argued that “nobody is saying we do not have ghost names in the system so it was good he apologized”.
Mr. Kamal said the fact that the Minister has realized his mistakes and come out to apologize means some work has been done. “It means it is a canker that has been cleared,” he said.