By: Nana K. B-Boampong
When Liverpool fans start calling for Arne Slot’s head barely a season after he lifted the league title, it tells you something about modern expectations. You can be a hero in May and a liability by December. Football does not care about yesterday’s glory. A bad run of form, a few poor decisions, and suddenly the man who delivered a championship is being sized up for the chopping block. Performance is everything. Sentiment is optional.
Now imagine if Ghana’s public service worked with even a fraction of that energy.
In football, everyone knows the rules. If you deliver, you stay. If you underperform, you are politely shown the exit before the next transfer window. It may be ruthless, but it creates one thing Ghana’s public service often struggles with: accountability.
Imagine, for a moment, that public institutions were run with the same performance culture. No political insulation. No mysterious “appointments in confidence.” No recycling of individuals who have delivered little beyond loyalty. Just a simple, transparent equation: results or replacement.
It sounds harsh, but it is precisely why football attracts the best managers and maintains a certain standard. Everyone understands that achievement matters. The incentives are aligned. The expectations are clear. And the system is wired to protect the interests of the club, not the comfort of individuals.
Now compare that with Ghana’s public service, where performance reviews are treated like delicate family conversations and contracts often mean very little when political tides shift. In many cases, those who work hard are not rewarded, and those who fail upward simply know the right person. It is a cycle that drains morale, frustrates talent and pushes capable people into the private sector where merit is not a foreign concept.
A performance-driven culture would not only improve productivity, it would attract our best minds back into public administration. People would see public service as a serious career path, not a political annex. The country would finally get value for money, and citizens would enjoy institutions that actually work.
But we cannot talk about performance without confronting the legal and structural environment that shapes the system. Ghana’s constitutional architecture gives the Executive far too much power in appointments. Virtually every head of a public corporation owes their position to political goodwill, not professional track record. The outcome is predictable. When loyalty becomes more valuable than competence, square pegs suddenly find themselves in round holes, expected to run institutions they barely understand.
The fear of losing one’s job should come from failing to deliver, not from failing to show political allegiance. Yet today, career public servants can be tossed out like managers at a relegation-threatened club, not because they failed to perform, but because a new government simply wants its own people.
If the Constitution is to serve the public interest, it must create a buffer that protects professionalism. Reform is overdue. The Executive should not be appointing heads of every public corporation. Board-driven competitive recruitment should be the norm. Tenure should be secure and tied to measurable KPIs. And dismissal should follow a fair, transparent process built on performance, not politics.
Ghana has brilliant, capable people. What we lack is a governance model that treats public service with the same seriousness that a football club treats its technical bench. When the right people are hired, expectations are clear, and accountability is real, institutions thrive. When incompetence is protected and performance is optional, the nation pays the price.
A results-based public administration may sound tough, but it would be good for Ghana. After all, if we demand excellence from our football clubs, why should we settle for anything less from the people trusted to run our country?
