ENLISTMENT ON HOLD * In Police Service

Front Page: Daily Graphic, June 15, 2009.
Story: Albert K. Salia
THE Police Administration has suspended the enlistment of persons into the Ghana Police Service this year because of inadequate housing facilities.
Accordingly, the Inspector-General of Police (IGP), Mr Paul Tawiah Quaye, has tasked the Estate Department of the service to submit a status report of all police accommodation projects throughout the country within the shortest possible time.
The department is also to explore possibilities to secure private accommodation to be rented for personnel of the service.
Currently, most police recruits are sheltered in the offices, workshops and garages of police commands throughout the country.
Throwing more light on the decision by the Police Administration to suspend enlistment into the service this year, Mr Quaye told the Daily Graphic yesterday that one area where personnel were demoralisation was the provision of decent accommodation.
“We do not want to compound the already bad situation by recruiting personnel who will have no place to lay their heads,” he said.
He said within this period, the Police Administration was seeking to complete and renovate as many accommodation facilities as it could to ease the accommodation problem facing the service, saying, “The government has shown goodwill to support the Police Administration.”
Besides the financial support that the government was expected to provide to undertake those projects, Mr Quaye said he expected it to announce plans to deal with accommodation and improve on facilities at the various barracks.
When asked how the Police Administration intended to cope with the low number of personnel and the increasing demand for their services, he said it would use the period to organise in-service training programmes for the more than 24,000 personnel to improve upon their delivery.
He said there were question marks on the quality of service delivered by the personnel and was hopeful that with the re-training, their deficiencies would be addressed to deal with the absence of large numbers whose performance was questionable.
That notwithstanding, he said, the administration intended to deal with the accommodation crisis as soon as possible to start the recruitment exercise with the view to attaining the UN ratio of one policeman to 500 people. The current ratio in Ghana is 1:1,000.
Mr Quaye, however, explained that future recruitment was not going to be based on the availability of accommodation, saying, “We will ensure that quality of personnel is something we can rely on.”
Earlier, a statement signed by the Director of Police Public Affairs, DSP Kwesi Ofori, had explained that the essence of improving accommodation facilities was to provide personnel with the requisite comfort and the enabling environment for maximum output.
It said notwithstanding the suspension of the recruitment exercise, the Police Administration was going to re-condition its human resource by way of personnel development and other measures to meet its mandate of maintenance of law and order, protection of lives and property, including fighting robbery, and ensuring security in the communities.
It gave the assurance that the Police Administration would come out with its calendar on recruitment and training programmes.
During his maiden visit to the Accra Regional Police Command on June 2, this year, the IGP had expressed concern over the poor manner in which recruit Constables and some Inspectors and senior officers were accommodated in single-room barracks and argued that personnel could not be expected to give of their best if they had no decent places to lay their heads when they retired from duty at the end of the day.