The Director, Faculty of Academic Affairs & Research, at the Kofi Annan International Peace-Keeping Centre (KAIPC) Dr Kwesi Aning has said the Ghana Police Service is not good at maintaining its accommodation facilities.
According to him, there’s the need for police personnel to initiate their own move to making their residential facilities attractive even if governmental support is not forthcoming.
Several accommodation facilities for personnel of the Ghana Police Service is not in the best of shape as compared to that of the Military. A sizable number of police officers live in poor conditions with most of them having their rooms congested forcing them to sometimes keep their electrical gadgets such as refrigerators on their veranda.
Some have said some police officers conduct themselves in an unprofessional manner and are also ineffective in the discharge of their work because of the lack of support they get from the state to make their lives comfortable.
But speaking to Fiifi Banson on Anopa Kasapa on Kasapa FM, Dr Aning disagreed with such school of thought saying there’s no reason for the police to be unprofessional.
“The poor condition our police personnel live in, by itself shouldn’t lead to indiscipline nor ineffectiveness. Because I’ve argued that although these are formed units, if possible a small crack group should be maintained in all the sensitive areas that can respond quickly so they can live comfortably and then the rest can have private accommodation, pay them well for them to rent themselves. But that has not been done so we need to improve accommodation and improve all sorts of things, but that should not prevent them from being effective in the interim, far from it. Because whilst we’re sensitive to their needs, when we look at accommodation for nurses, teachers, they also have problems.
“But the police service in particular has a poor maintenance culture because if you travel round the villages buildings that have been given to the police, the levels of deterioration are quiet manifest. Can we then turn the story, can they themselves initiate steps to make their residence nice, there must be some desire to make their homes look good. But I think as a nation we need to say these are the people who laid down their lives and sacrifice their blood and so perhaps we need to spend a little more on them. But there’s an explanation to this, when we went to the World Bank and IMF for the structural adjustment programme, part of the conversation was that our military expenditure should not exceed a certain percentage. So for almost 20 years I think we’ve spent not more than 1% of GDP on both the military and police.”
