The Council of State Cannot Justify the Amounts We Spend on Them – Prof. Agyeman-Duah

Former Senior United Nations Governance Advisor, Professor Baffour Agyeman-Duah says the Council of State should be entirely scrapped from the constitution of Ghana.

According to him, their role in the state machinery is redundant and merely contributes to the duplicity seen in several Ghanaian governments over the years.

He noted that their main mandate which was to provide advice to the President has been usurped by the Presidential appointments of special advisors; thus currently the Council is merely creating jobs for itself to justify the salary it receives.

Speaking on JoyNews’ PM Express, he said, “The creation is redundant. Before the Kufour administration when Professor Kwapong, the former Vice Chancellor of the University of Ghana was made the chairman of the Council of State, before then, the Council of State was existing mainly to give advice to the President.

“It was Kwapong who organized it and started getting them to write papers to do this to do that because otherwise, they had nothing much to do. So if they’re now creating jobs for themselves like my good friend Fuseini was saying, if there’s a crisis in this place they’ll go and sort it out and all, these are additional things they’ve created, otherwise they have nothing to do to justify the amounts that we spend on them and their bureaucracy.”