The Roads Ministry Needs 1,000 More Employees - Agbodza

The Minister for Roads and Highways, Kwame Governs Agbodza has disclosed that his outfit has asked for recruitment of roughly 1,000 more employees in order to improve operations throughout its agencies and fill growing staffing shortages in the industry.

The Minister revealed this in an appearance before Parliament's Select Committee on Economy and Development, stating that the Chief Director of the Ministry made the request in response to rising staffing demands.

He explained that the development of administrative regions without a corresponding increase in road agency manpower has made the need for more workers inevitable.

He pointed out that this has resulted in the overstretching of important technical departments, such as engineers and quality assurance staff, which has an impact on the effectiveness of project management and completion.

The needs of ongoing infrastructure projects cannot be met by the current workforce levels, according to Agbodza, especially in recently established regions where institutional capacity is still lacking.

He emphasized that increasing overall service delivery in the road sector, guaranteeing quality assurance, and enhancing monitoring all depend on closing the staffing gap.

“The staffing level of the agencies is far less than what it should be. If you consider the fact that we are investing heavily on these projects, part of the reason some of the projects suffer quality assurance is simply because we don’t have enough people to monitor these projects.

“We’ve got approval for 137 staff at various level, QSEs, engineers and everything, but that was just for highways. The chief director has since submitted a request for about 1,000, because don’t forget, we created six new regions and didn’t actually staff them with new staff,” he said.

The Minister, however, gave Parliament the assurance that work is being done to improve the Ministry's and its agencies' operational capability and address the personnel issues.