If President Akufo-Addo begins delivering on his “transformational agenda” the brouhaha over the gigantic size of his government will “cease to be an issue,” the Director of Communications of the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP) has said.
Commenting on the unabated flak the president had received following revelations that his government size is the largest in the history of the country, Nana Akomea admitted that the criticisms against the president are legitimate.
Akufo-Addo has appointed 110 ministers in total, making his government the biggest in the Fourth Republic. The previous NPP government led by former President John Kufuor had 88 ministers while the Mills administration that succeeded it had 69 ministerial appointees. The Mahama administration, however, had 78 ministerial appointments.
The size of the Akufo-Addo government was met with vicious criticism. As a result, Minister of Information Mustapha Hamid Wednesday hurriedly organized a news conference to defend the government’s size.
The NPP, he said, had never “promised a lean government” when it was in opposition, stressing that the end result is what matters when constituting a government.
“Nowhere did we ever promise a lean government because in our view it is not the leanness or bigness of a government that determines its output or its ultimate performance,” he told journalists Wednesday.
Nonetheless, Mr. Nketia of the opposition NDC believed otherwise, describing Mr. Hamid’s defense as preposterous.
“The argument that the economy is so destroyed that they need a bigger team to do the work also doesn’t make sense,” he told TV3.
The Minority Chief Whip, Muntaka Mubarak said Wednesday the size of Akufo-Addo’s government is shocking.
But in a Facebook post Thursday, Mr. Akomea said: “For now, these numbers are an issue, and the concerns being raised about them are legitimate, as expected, and in order, just as the NPP in opposition raised them. If he indeed begins to deliver concretely on his transformational agenda, then the numbers will cease to be an issue.”
