The Minority in Parliament has threatened to summon the Interior Minister, Henry Quartey, before the House over allegations of secret recruitment into the security services. This follows reports of a planned recruitment of 11,000 personnel from a backlog of applicants over the years.
The Minority contends that a press release from the Ghana Police Service suggests there is no backlog to be recruited into the security services. Addressing journalists, James Agalga, the Ranking Member of the Defence and Interior Committee of Parliament, insisted that the recruitment process must be transparent and fair.
Agalga argued that the police had cleared all applicants from the 2021-2022 recruitment exercise, indicating that any new recruitment should require fresh applications with clear eligibility criteria. He called for advertisements outlining these criteria, as was customary during the NDC era, to ensure fairness and transparency.
“This is documentary evidence. They are saying that the entire recruitment process for the 2021 to 2022 recruitment process has come to an end. The idea of a backlog is that you start some recruitment process and along the way you are unable to complete the exercise, so you have some outstanding applicants to deal with. That is what the backlog is all about. But the police are saying that they had cleared all the applicants,” Agalga explained.
He further noted, “What that means is that those who were not shortlisted and issued admission letters had not met the eligibility criteria for recruitment. So they had drawn the curtain for the 2021 to 2022 recruitment exercise. And that is the message we have been seeking to drum home, that there is nothing like a backlog.”
Agalga emphasized the need for transparency: “This is not the first time the security services under the Ministry of the Interior will recruit. In the era of the NDC, we did some recruitments, but those recruitments were preceded by advertisements which captured the eligibility criteria. So all the leaders said, let the minister for the interior play according to the rules of fairness and transparency and cause an advert to be made.”
He concluded by stating, “He [Interior Minister] would have to be hauled to appear before the House and explain to Ghanaians why the recruitment process under his watch is shrouded in so much secrecy.”
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