Ato Coleman lauds President’s State of the Nation Address

Accra, Mar. 11, GNA – Mr Casely Ato Coleman, Senior Global HR Practitioner, has lauded the 2021 State of the Nation Address (SONA) by the President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo to Parliament.

The visiting professor of Human Resources at Senegal Institute Superieur De Management described the 2021 SONA as very detailed with positive implications for Human Resources (HR) development in Ghana.

Mr Ato Coleman said whiles the President’s focus on Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM), constituted a high level intent to reinforce investment in critical human resources development, it must be underpinned by strengthening values driven leadership science skills.

He advocated for the inclusion of values driving Leadership in the STEM; thus STEML, since many of the nation’s woes since independence had been caused by poor values driven leadership across all sectors of the economy.

Speaking to the Ghana News Agency in Accra, Mr Ato Coleman said the Ghana Project proposed by the President was very transformative as a concept and its execution would require values driven leadership teams especially in Government and business who would play crucial role in “modelling the values” and creating and sustaining the required culture of transformation and growth through their own behaviours.

With regards to data/digitization, Mr Ato Coleman, who is also a Senior Fellow, IMANI Africa, and a part-time lecturer at the University of Ghana Business School, noted that President Nana Akufo-Addo, presented a lot of data to support his state of nation address which indicated a movement towards data driven decision making in national governance.

Mr Ato Coleman, however, called on civil society organizations (CSOs) and the media to strengthen their data analysis capabilities to subject the data to further scrutiny to enhance quality governance to support the President’s bold priorities for his second term.

He suggested that CSOs, political parties and the media must invest in building their project management capabilities with a focus on diagnosis, design, monitoring, evaluation and learning in order to enhance integrity driven data analysis and policy engagement across all sectors of Ghana’s social, economic and political development.

He argued that Ghana had reached a stage in its development where competing perspectives and discussions must be based on sound rational data driven analysis and not from narrow emotional partisan considerations.

Concerning COVID-19, Mr Ato Coleman, said the pandemic, had led to massive job cuts and it was therefore, commendable that the Government of Ghana was able to protect all public sector jobs.

He however, advised on the need to strengthen transparency in health sector recruitment processes and outcomes in order to ensure that competent people were engaged to support the ongoing health sector reforms.

Mr Ato Coleman argued that the vision of President Akufo-Addo to make Ghana a centre of medical excellence was one of the most ambitious agenda, which if delivered would be a game changer to the structure of Ghana’s economy, because the foundation of national development hinged on health and education.

Mr Ato Coleman however, intimated on the need to strengthen the technical, organizational and leadership capabilities of Human Resource (HR) Professionals in the Health sector since they would require an HR Business Partnering mindset to be able to facilitate the flow of talent, nurture, motivate and retain the high caliber of subject matter medical expertise to be managed under the policy.

GNA