The government will soon outdoor a new human resource management policy and a legal and regulatory framework that will empower managers to fire lazy and undisciplined staff within specified guidelines, Mr Jake Obetsebi-Lamptey, Minister of Presidential Affairs, announced in Accra.

Opening a two-day national planning workshop on the Phase II of the Public Sector Management Reform Programme (PSMRP), Mr Obetsebi-Lamptey said the government would also take measures to ensure that senior public service appointments are based on merit and transparent recruitment processes. "We must all therefore strive hard for excellence in our present and future jobs," he said.

He expressed the hope that stakeholders would collaborate to build a better public service that is performance driven and imbued with a sense of dedication, commitment, creativity and hard work.

Initiated in December 1994, the reform programme is to define a new vision and role for the public service as a means of promoting efficiency, effectiveness, good customer relationship and accountability. It involves downsizing staff levels and transferring the affected workers to alternative employment areas where they will be relevant.

Mr Obetsebi-Lamptey said the issue of both national and public sector management capacity building must be at the core of the reforms, emphasizing the use of distinguished local consultants as a matter of preference.

"Where foreign consultants need to be used as a result of the competition, we must make sure they are bringing to bear on the reforms rare skills and experience with adequate provisions made for capacity, knowledge and technology transfer both to local consultants and to our public sector managers."

The Minister expressed regret at the practice where consultants are made to assume the control of the transformation process instead of the public sector managers. "Such approach, apart from being costly, also creates problems of resistance for lack of ownership, exclusion and untimely delivery of outputs and outcomes," he said.

The National Overview Committee (NOC), which oversees the implementation of the PSMRP, has evolved a strategy to improve management and staff ownership of the reforms.

The NOC believes that once consultants have completed studies and approvals have been given for implementation to proceed, the management of the agencies must be put in charge and the role of consultants reduced to that of facilitation and advisory.

This approach, is being used in the restructuring of the Office of the President, and it has allowed the process to move faster than it could have possibly been, the Chief of Staff said.

Mr Obetsebi-Lamptey gave the assurance that the NOC will study the draft document thoroughly and provide stakeholders a forum to finally approve the document. Ms Jessica Irvine, Senior Ghana Programme Manager, DFID, said budgetary support to the government would depend on how effective it carried on with the public sector reforms.

The DFID was currently reviewing its support strategy for the country, based on the Ghana Poverty Reduction Strategy. Ms Irvine mentioned poor budgetary and financial management and coordination of reform initiatives as some problems facing the public sector and called for high political commitment and clear articulation of public sector reform strategy to revitalise the process.

Dr Appiah Koranteng, National Coordinator of the National Institutional Renewal Programme, said plans to modernise and improve both internal and external communication with the use of less paper had been developed to move the public sector towards electronic-governance.