Trade Minister inaugurates two boards
Accra (Greater Accra) 06 February 2002 - The Director of
Legal and Governance of the Ghana Centre for Democratic Development has
criticised the appointment of Members of Parliament (MPs) to the boards of
state owned enterprise (SOEs) by the president and called for its immediate
seizure, if Ghana is to build the needed corporate governance culture necessary
for the economic development of the economy.
He argues that such appointments are unnecessary since
parliament has a constitutional mandatory oversight responsibility over all
SOE’s that empowers it to invite ministers to appear before appropriate
committees to be quizzed.
Mr Prempeh’s arguments are contained in a research work
titled Reforming corporate governance in Ghana in which he calls for the
institution of the right and necessary legal structures to foster the culture
of corporategovernance among state owned enterprise in this era of “Golden Age
of Business.” Which would then mean “in constituting a board, only persons
whose background, professional training and interest make them likely to add
value to the governance of the corporation.”
The appointment of MPs to the boards of SOEs is considered
in political circles as the last resort by the executive to appease MPs who
lose out on appointment as ministers.
While admitting the weakness of the parliament in performing
its oversight duties, Mr. Prempeh challenged MPs to insist on seeing audited
financial statements of all SOEs, which would enable it (parliament) to perform
its investigating role effectively. He also called for the scraping of the
power of the president to and - Network Herald - NCS
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Accra (Greater Accra) 06 February 2002 - An Information Technology (IT) advisor of the Ministry of Communications and Technology on Tuesday advised public and private institutions, which rely heavily on information systems to ensure that their IT staff learn to manage all the environments of computers.
"IT managers need to be taught to manage every environment of computers to be able to use devices effectively to store information instead of dumping them onto hard disks which can easily get corrupted," said Mr Crosby Tekyi-Mills, at the launch of a data recovery software in Accra.
The software, known as the Stellar Phoenix 8.0, a product of India's Stellar Information Systems Limited, helps to recover important data, which may be lost as a result of total loss of systems area or other reasons.
It is marketed in Ghana by Pat Gate Limited, a business support services company. Available statistics at Pat Gate indicated that crash of hard disk, loss of data on floppy disks and hard disks, were caused by viruses, human error, natural disaster, software corruption, sabotage or system malfunctioning. Human error takes the greater percentage of 30.
Mr Tekyi-Mills, however, said these problems could be avoided if IT managers were trained in all software environments instead of individual applications such as spreadsheet, an accounting software or word.
"Apart from the listed errors that lead to loss of data, we work in a harsh environment of inefficient power supply of upsurges and dips in electricity," Mr Tekyi-Mills said, adding that IT users were bound to face problems even when there was a back up support system.
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Bawku (Upper East) 06 February 2002 - Whereas the Bawku East District Assembly failed to meet its revenue target for last year, its sister district, Bawku West made an impressive stride in revenue generation the same year.
Revenue generated as at December 2001 was 46.5 million cedis as against 28.3 million cedis collected in 2000, representing an increase of 64 per cent, whereas the Bawku East District collected 507.2 million cedis last year against revenue target of 749.3 million cedis.
The District Chief Executive (DCE) for Bawku West, Mr Moses Appiah gave his assembly's statement in Bawku at a recent DCE's monthly meeting. He said out of 1.4 billion cedis received as its share of the District Assemblies' Common Fund, it used 1.2 billion cedis for development programmes including the disbursement of Poverty Alleviation Fund to 107 beneficiaries, paid contractors and catered for self-help projects among other things.
Mr Appiah said several projects under the European Union Micro Projects were near completion. These included the construction of nurses' quarters with a five-seat KVIP at Teshie, market stalls at Ghantongo and a block of three classrooms and an office.
Mr Appiah said as part of the assembly's bit to alleviate poverty in the area, it had acquired 18 donkeys and carts to facilitate agriculture and rural transportation.
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Accra (Greater Accra) 06 February 2002 - Dr Kofi Konadu Apraku, Minister of Trade and Industry, on Tuesday tasked the Ghana Standards Board (GSB) to adopt strategies to smoke-out unscrupulous manufacturers, who put its certification mark on their products without their consent.
He also asked the Board to check those, who after getting their products certified, lowered their standard and yet displayed the GSB certification mark.
Inaugurating the governing boards of the Ghana Standards Board and the Ghana Heavy Equipment Limited (GHEL) in Accra, Dr Apraku said since the thrust of Ghana's economic programme was on export, the GSB should expedite action to inform and educate manufacturers on how to have their products certified as demanded by the international consumer.
The nine-member GSB Board has Professor Emmanuel Kenneth Agyei of the University of Ghana, Legon, as its Chairman while the chairman for the eight-member Board of GHEL is Mr Kofi Asare Darkwa Poku, a businessman.
This would make their products to be well marketed in Europe and America. He urged GSB to work hand-in-hand with the Customs, Excise and Preventive Service (CEPS) to ensure that sub-standard and expired goods were not dumped in the country at the peril of national health.
Dr Apraku also urged GSB to take cognisance of its national functions by finding ways that could make it profitable and also develop standards to support national policy of promoting non-traditional export products.
On GHEL, the Minister said there was a wider scope open to the company to grow and make significant contribution to employment generation and financial contribution to the government as a public commercial entity.
He said as GHEL was a division of the defunct Ghana National trading Corporation (GNTC), it was a challenge to the new board and management to work hard to uplift and sustain the company to cut down the cost of importing heavy equipment.
"We should at least be able to assemble some of the equipment here to cut down cost since our country is faced with a significant budget deficit."
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