MoH honours workers (Page 35)

December 22,2008.
THE immediate past Rector of the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration (GIMPA), Professor Stephen Adei, has challenged Ghanaians not to allow party politics to continue to divide them but should rather form a united front if they want to develop as a nation.
He said it was unfortunate that people had deliberately created what he referred to as enhanced division, especially on political lines, which had negatively affected the development of the nation.
At an end-of-year get-together organised by the Ministry of Health (MOH) in Accra on Friday, Prof. Adei said the country was so much divided on the basis of New Patriotic Party (NPP) and National Democratic Congress (NDC) to the extent that some people found it extremely difficult to work with others even if those other persons could perform.
Touching on the upcoming presidential run-off scheduled for December 28, he predicted that it would be difficult for the winner to get more than 53 per cent of the total votes and said if it happened like that, the other 47 per cent of the electorate should not be sidelined but included in the building of the nation.
“There is the need for us to learn to work together because nobody ever succeeds alone,” he emphasised.
On the attitude of some civil servants, he stressed that it was wrong for people to believe that they could achieve results by doing the same thing over and over again and advised that it was important for people to change their way of doing things for the better if they actually wanted to move forward.
Prof. Adei also complained about the Ghanaian attitude where meanings were read into every move senior public officials made and said elsewhere, an employee could be hired or fired based on efficiency but “here you cannot do that without people giving all manner of reasons for your actions”.
The Minister of Health, Major Courage Quashigah (retd), said it was good that there would be Christmas celebration before the presidential run-off and urged people to remember the message of the season, which was peace, and go by it.
He took the opportunity to advise all Ghanaians, especially the ordinary people, to learn from events of some neighbouring countries where there had been conflicts because of elections and observed that when war broke, it was the ordinary person who suffered most.
Maj. Quashigah also reminded Ghanaians to avoid drunkenness during the Yuletide, since too much alcohol could cause people their lives either through accidents or ill health. He also spoke against people taking in too much food during the occasion.
Welfare messages were presented on behalf of the development partners, agencies under the ministry and the staff of the ministry.
As part of the programme, awards were presented to some personalities for their performance over the years and institutions who had helped the ministry perform its functions.
They included Maj. Quashigah, Dr (Mrs) Gladys Norley Ashietey, who is a deputy minister at the ministry; the Government’s Spokesperson on Social Services, Mr Kofi Amponsah Bediako. Others were Mr James Nortey, Ms Regina Abordoh and Ms Doris Parry, the overall best worker.
Institutions that were awarded were the World Health Organisation (WHO), the United Nations International Children and Education Fund (UNICEF) the Department for International Development (DFID), the African Development Fund, the Royal Netherlands Embassy in Ghana and the Global Fund.