The Weekly Standard has suggested that the free-speaking Deputy Minister of Energy, Mr. K. T. Hammond, nominated for appointment as Deputy Health Minister, is being moved out of his present job because he has failed to perform creditably.

According to the paper, but for the difficulty President Kufuor has in getting qualified persons to take up appointments in his government, K.T. Hammond would have been sacked.

According to the Weekly Standard, K. T. Hammond’s removal from government was precipitated by his boss, Joseph Kofi Addah, who, in trying to save himself from being axed from his position as the Energy Minister, made a very strong case to President Kufuor that if anyone needed to be sacked then it ought to be K. T. Hammond.

“Kofi Addah’s case, we have learnt, was quite simply that he had barely been a year old at the Ministry before the energy crisis erupted and that K. T. Hammond who had been in the Ministry as a deputy Minister for the last three years ought to have been better informed about such matters so as to brief any new Minister posted to the Ministry,” the paper said.

It continued that K. T. Hammond himself did not help matters very much when in discussions with some of his colleagues over the energy crisis, he failed to differentiate between kilowatt hour and megawatt hour.

"These things get around, and the President eventually gets to hear these display of ignorance. But when it gets to the point that the man himself has virtually thrown in the towel and he is now depending solely on God for solutions to the problem then obviously he must make way for some fresh mind to come and find solution to the problem," a highly placed source at the Castle told the Weekly Standard.

In an interview with Joy FM’s Israel Laryea, K. T. Hammond made it clear that the NPP made adequate plans to fix the energy crisis, however those plans did not yield the desired result, explaining rather philosophically that even though man may propose, God is the eventual disposer.

Source: Weekly Standard