Professor of Anaesthesiolggy and Critical Care, Professor Yaw Adu Gyamfi believes Ghana continues to underuse its most experienced professionals due to poor leadership systems and excessive politicisation.

Speaking on The Sages on JoyNews, the academic expressed frustration that the country still relies heavily on foreign contractors while sidelining qualified Ghanaians.

“So in that regard we haven’t done too well. We tend to waste human resource. At Independence as I said, we didn’t have more than a thousand doctors. A lot less. But I would just shift from the doctors. How many engineers did we have? And how many really good teachers elsewhere that we had? But then we weren’t thinking, it’s like civil service should be the only employer. So we were busy to extrude people through the pension system.”

He criticised the retirement system, arguing that it forces experienced professionals out when they are still capable of contributing to national development.

“Can you imagine somebody like a civil engineer, fantastic architect, the more they grow in the service or their profession, the more experience and so on and better delivery and so on. And yet at 60 they tell you to go. I don’t mind, but the system should be such that as you extrude them, you can at least gather them for them to keep delivering.”

He further lamented Ghana’s reliance on foreign contractors despite having trained experts locally for decades.

“Up till now we still have bring foreign companies to build our roads. And do all kinds of things. We’ve had Tech and even Legon for a longtime. Our coast is eroding away. We try and we wish that some foreign will come and help us build cities."

"So, take my mind back how I worked Holland this time Amsterdam. Amsterdam is below sea level it was reclaimed. This is like three, four hundred years ago. How many and how how much classy how many classy or engineers they had at that time what was the extent of their knowledge to conceive of this to build to retrieve the land that with our current system here we were unable to encourage our engineers with their rocks and granite and things we have that cut it or blast it in big boulders to reclaim the land for us.”

Prof Adu-Gyamfi believes a change in leadership culture is needed, one that values institutional knowledge and removes political bias in public service.

“It’s just leadership and management. And you retire them you throw them out with no work to do they die off quickly. But I’m saying that the system must be re-engineered such that you don’t throw people off so easily with accumulated knowledge memory knowledge base historical knowledge who are able to who could be able or should be able to improvise to help us in these things.
Well it should be looked at."

"Yeah. It should be looked that’s one. And then this business of over politicization that is adding to the extrusion — you are from this other party and they put in this place you dream very well you know the things something that is of worth. Instead of being allowed to continue because you’re blue colour or green colour you’re thrown out. Yes. It’s wrong.”

He called for urgent reforms to leadership, institutional systems, and political culture to ensure Ghana makes better use of its human resource and local expertise.