Vice President of policy think-tank, IMANI Ghana, Kofi Bentil has described the Board of the Social Security and National Insurance Trust (SSNIT) as “dysfunctional.”
According to him, if it was discharging duties as expected, it would have found out that one of its workers had fake credentials.
“SSNIT is dysfunctional, from the Board all the way to the fake people with degrees. The board sits down for this to happen, they don’t do a value for money audit or anything and this blows up in our faces.You let this happen and you sit there as a board? They are dysfunctional,” he stressed.
Mr Bentil was speaking on Joy FM’s new analysis programme, Newsfile on Saturday.
SSNIT has for some weeks now been in the news for all the wrong reasons.
First, a Joy News investigation revealed that the Trust had spent some $72 million to procure a faulty software.
The contract, awarded in 2012, was to automate processes at the Trust.
It was to provide superior services to SSNIT customers, reduce member enrollment cycle through forms, provide effective reporting solution, achieve real time processing of contribution reports and reduce benefit processing time.
The initial contract sum was $34 million, but the Trust ended up spending more within the period of four years.
It was during investigations into the matter that the Economic and Organised Crime Office (EOCO) discovered that the man who superintended over the purchase had fake degrees.
EOCO said Dr Caleb Afaglo who was Head of Management Information Systems at the Trust did not have a doctorate degree as he claimed, neither did he have masters or a first degree.
In Mr Bentil’s view, no proactive board in a company would allow this to happen.
“If you run a company and somebody commits a crime in the company, steals, defrauds by false pretence, first thing, you dismiss him and hand him over to the police. You don’t put him on interdiction.”
If this was done, he believes, there would have been no need for EOCO’s intervention.
Member of Parliament for Tamale Central, Inusah Fuseini, who was also on the show, agrees with Mr Bentil.
He said the fact that it was an outside body that discovered that the Trust had an employee with fake credentials discredits the Board. “Possession of fake documents is a crime. It is not the remit of EOCO, it is within the remit of the police.”
He was also of the view that putting Dr Afaglo on interdiction, tarnishes his reputation and the Board could have prevented this.
“Why would they be saying that he has been interdicted,” he queried, adding “”We are prone to tarnishing the reputation of people with our mouth? “If you really believe that this man has defrauded the state, hand him over to the police to prosecute and convict him then you have a basis to sack him, simple.
“That is why he [Kofi Bentil] says the board is dysfunctional,” he added.
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