The Chief of Staff, Frema Osei Opare, has come out to justify the nine hundred and ninety eight (998) presidential staffers employed at the presidency of Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo.

Speaking to Accra-based Citi FM yesterday, which was monitored by Today, the chief of staff disclosed that the 998 presidential staffers at the presidency work around the clock to midnight to keep the country running at all times.

That enormous task required that more hands were needed to keep the country going, she explained.

Madam Osei Opare, under whom the 998 staffers work, broke her silence on the matter for the first time on Citi FM.

“You can have ten people in an enterprise and they will all be overstaffed. But, you may have 20 staff and they will rather be understaffed. What is worrying is when the people are not seriously engaged but are loitering about’, she said.

According to her, the Akufo-Addo-led government was one that was consistently having cabinet meetings even at midnight to work around the clock to help grow the Ghanaian economy.

“This is a government that has a lot of important initiatives that require our participation and engagement. What you do is that you hire people and if your citizens who have skills and talents you can accelerate development by just having the people to use those talents. So are they able to tell me that a ministry is idle overstaffed?

Furthermore, she underscored that the Akufo-Addo-led government was a “busy government.”

In this regard, she dared critics to go to any of the ministries and observe whether appointees were loitering about.

It would be recalled that the Akufo-Addo administration received loads of flaks when the news broke that it had 998 presidential staffers.

Think-tanks and civil society groups including Centre for Democratic Development-Ghana (CDD-Ghana), which waded into the matter, expressed disappointment in President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo’s decision to engage that huge number of staffers.

Consequently, CDD-Ghana in a statement described the number of appointments as ‘super-sized.’

Source: peacefmonline.com