President John Mahama has stated that his decision to eliminate the Ministry of Information is part of efforts to reduce the size of government.

It would be recalled that the President, on January 11, reduced the number of ministries from 30 to 23, in the exercise of the power conferred on him under section 11(3) of the Civil Service Act, 1993 (PNDCL 327), the Civil Service (Ministries) Instrument, 2025.

“Now, about government communications, you notice that there is no information ministry in the lineup of 23 ministries that we recently announced. That was partly in response to our promise to downsize the government,” he said.

President Mahama said this during a courtesy call on him by Esther Ambah Numaba Cobbah, the President, of the Institute of Public Relations (IPR), Ghana at the Flagstaff House in Accra on Wednesday.

“But then it also meant that we had to be very strategic in how we dealt, especially with the flow of information from government, because that’s critical to the success of whatever we intend to do, and so the structure we put was to bring (the) Information (Ministry) into the Presidency,” he said.

“And that’s how come we have a Minister of State in charge of Governmental Communications.”

That was to anchor it with a string of strong communications professionals in the most critical sectors to guarantee as much information flow to the public as possible.

President Mahama said one of the things that remained to be done was to bring the Information Services Department (ISD) under the Presidency and modernise that organisation from a civil service into a modern organisation that guaranteed information flow to the public on government activities.

He reiterated that the days of the cinema van were gone and that Ghanaians had all kinds of new instruments of communication.

“That Department must be reformed,” he said, and that plans were in place to restructure the ISD and the Ghana News Agency to make them more efficient in fulfilling their mandates.

The Government needed to create a certain synergy and modernise the two state organisations to enhance news and information flow to Ghanaians, the President said.

He said the ISD served as a good platform for government’s communication with the public in terms of making as much information available as possible.

Madam Cobbah, on her part, congratulated President Mahama on his election victory and hailed him for being a committed Member of the IPR Ghana.

She commended him for donating a bus to the Institute.