TAKE ANOTHER LOOK AT STATE VEHICLES (MAY 1, 2009)

FOLLOWING closely on the heels of the government’s announcement that it is reviewing the sale of 14 state bungalows to some former government functionaries, private individuals and entities is the directive to immediate past government appointees in possession of state vehicles that are less than two years old to return them.
The latest announcement has caused an enormous furore, threats of court action by some individuals who contend that they did no wrong in acquiring those vehicles and notices of defiance by some who are being requested to top up their payments before they can legally take possession of the vehicles.
According to a Deputy Information Minister, Samuel Okudzeto-Ablakwa, more than 50 of such vehicles are in the possession of former government appointees. Out of these, 18 are said to be less than two years old, while the rest were under-valued.
So far, none of the people, both current and past government officials, who have spoken on the issue has quoted any law guaranteeing the sale of state vehicles to their users on leaving office and, therefore, it could be assumed, for now, that the practice is a convention until later proved to be otherwise.
Be it as it may, a circular dated February 23, 2005 and issued by the then Chief of Staff, Mr Kwadwo Mpiani, to ministers of state and regional ministers and copied to all chief directors and regional co-ordinating directors directed that state vehicles sold to users on their request should not be less than two years old and their sale should not create difficulties to the organisations.
It is obvious that the objective was to forestall a situation where fairly new state vehicles would be sold to state functionaries whose tenure of office had ended and a situation where the sale of such vehicles could cause a mobility and other problems for the state institutions to which they were assigned.
What better safeguards could there be than these?
It will be good, therefore, for those former appointees who have adopted a rather confrontational approach to the directive to calm down and co-operate with the new government to establish that, indeed, the sale of the vehicles to them is not at variance with the convention of selling state vehicles to their users.
Happily, three former government appointees, namely, Mr Andrew Awuni, former Press Secretary to former President Kufuor; Alhaji Abubakar Siddique Boniface, former Minister of Water Resources, Works and Housing, and the former Upper West Regional Minister, Mr George Hikah-Benson, have responded to the government’s ultimatum to return state vehicles in their possession (see page 3).
It will also be advisable for the Mills government to make public its findings on issues only after the facts had thoroughly been established to avoid maligning former appointees.
For the larger public, these developments — the sale of state vehicles and bungalows to government appointees at the end of their tenure of office — bring into sharp focus once again that it is becoming a norm for such appointees to become the automatic beneficiaries of good cars and in some cases good houses, in addition to their ex gratia, at the end of a four-year term of office.
For sure some high public officers too enjoy the benefit of buying their cars on retirement but comparatively some of these public and civil servants serve for long periods of time, some of them, 20 years and more.
But no matter how one looks at the issue, it’s about time we took a second look at this practice of selling state vehicles and bungalows to former government appointees and public civil servants so that if we would want to maintain it, the state would not ultimately be the loser.