Air Commodore Kwame Mamphey Director-General, Ghana Civil Aviation Authority (GCAA) & Mrs. Doreen Owusu Fianko, Managing Director, Ghana Airports Company Limited

IMANI’S TOP 5 PUBLIC SECTOR LEADERS (OUR HEROES AND HEROINES) FOR 2011 Yes, like the rest of the travelling public we know our major airports and the airline services available to Ghanaians could be much improved, but one has to appreciate where we have come from. It is also important to point out an easy misconception: GCAA is not responsible for every single element of the Airport experience of travelers; neither is GACL. The GCAA and the GACL together work to ensure smooth operations of airport activity. The GACL was decoupled from the GCAA and since 2007 both entities have worked seamlessly together. If you are still uncomfortable about the security arrangements at the airport or corruption on the part of some officers, bear in mind that several independent security agencies, such as the National Security Secretariat, Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA) and the Narcotics Control Board (NACOB), operate at the airport but do not report to the GCAA or the GACL in the ordinary course of things. With that in mind, now consider those things that ARE indeed within the authority of the Managing Director of the GACL and the Director General of the GCAA. Consider for instance the steady improvement in safety record management, including air-worthy certification management; streamlining of systems workflow (measurable through aggregating “on-time departure” counts); and critical systems uptime (i.e. how often backup electrical power fails, whether there are persistent air-conditioning failures, and how quick operators recover from system-level IT crashes etc.) In terms of contractor and/or third-party performance management, we take note of two major ongoing weaknesses: the unresolved perception within the industry that advertising contracts are being unduly interfered with and the completely unacceptable attempt to create a cartel for ground transportation, thus preventing legally registered taxi drivers in the Greater Accra area from operating within the airport, with no other purpose other than to enable this cartel to extort ridiculous fees from passengers and other users of the airport. We hope these issues will be addressed with speed.

Still, MRS. DOREEN OWUSU FIANKO and AIR CDRE KWAME MAMPHEY have both excelled in managing a complex renovation exercise during which capacity utilization had to be maintained and actually expanded throughout the transformation cycle, still ongoing. For this technical and managerial feat alone, they would have been strong contenders. Having performed reasonably well in the other areas of examination, we had little difficulty deciding unanimously to name them our Public Sector Hero and Heroine of the Year.

Published by IMANI Center for Policy & Education & syndicated on www.AfricanLiberty.org