<<Print>>

The Presidency has explained the reasoning behind the appointment of former BBC Presenter Ben Dotse Malor as Communications Adviser at the Flagstaff House. According to presidential staffer Dr Michael Kpessah-Whyte, the area of communications is one of the important areas which the President thought he needed an Adviser for, thus Mr Malor�s appointment. �The President decides on areas that are of key importance to him for which reason he has to appoint people with the necessary expertise to advise him on, and he has done so in many cases in the area of economic advisers, policy advisers, and he has done so in the area of a communication adviser as well�, Dr Kpessah-Whyte told XYZ Breakfast Show host Moro Awudu. According to him, Mr Malor�s appointment is not at variance with the appointment of other advisers on other different issues that are of key importance to the President. ��I don�t see how different this particular one is from other appointments. We have the ministry of Economic planning yet the President has economic advisers; we have the other policy areas � education, health and so on � yet the President has senior health policy advisers,� he pointed out. He added that: �If you go into each of the Ministries and the Agencies and the Departments in this country, they all have Public Relations Officers that speak specifically about the issues that individual ministries are working on and so how does that fault, in any way, the President also appointing within the presidency, senior communications adviser to head communications that come out from within the presidency?� Mr Malor�s appointment has been criticised by Communications expert Prof Audrey Gadzekpo, political Activist Dr Sekou Nkrumah and some opposition members. Prof Gadzekpo believes it is a redundant appointment which will merely duplicate the functions of the Ministry of Information and Media Relations. Despite conceding that Malor�s pedigree as a Communications person was impressive, Prof Gadzekpo said: �It seems to me that we have yet another presidential staffer drawing on the consolidated fund�. She also said the murky nature of the Communications structure at the Presidency makes Malor�s appointment even more confounding. �I wish we had a clearer sense of what the organogram is within the presidency and how the presidency is organised in terms of advisers on the different key segments that ought to be advising the presidency and also how communications is organised at the governmental level. What are the overlaps between the ministry of information and communications at the presidency? I�m not clear at all about these matters�. Dr Sekou Nkrumah also criticised the appointment as needless and said the best PR that any government could do for itself is to deliver.