GIMPA COUNCIL CHAIRMAN CONTINUES EVIDENCE

THE Chairman of the Governing Council of the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration (GIMPA), Dr Edward Henaku Boohene, told an Accra Fast Track High Court on Monday that the council appointed the GIMPA Rector, Dr Stephen Adei, for a second term until his retirement in December this year.
He said the council, at its meeting on July 14, 2005, accepted the recommendations and gave approval for the appointment after a committee appointed to search for a rector had submitted its report to it.
He was testifying under cross-examination by Mr Daniel Amarteifio, counsel for Dr Adei, in the case in which Mr Egbert Isaac Faibille Jnr is seeking an order from the court to restrain the GIMPA Rector from holding himself out as a professor of the institute.
Mr Faibille also wants the court to order that Dr Adei is not a professor, either at GIMPA or any other institution, and he should, therefore, be restrained from holding himself out as such.
He further wants the court to order GIMPA to advertise the position of rector, since it was vacant because, according to him, since the tenure of office of Dr Adei expired on October 1, 2004, he had not been re-appointed as rector.
Dr Boohene said Dr Adei was appointed under the original terms of his first contract until the new terms of contract were reviewed by the Finance and Accounts Board.
Asked why he did not write to Dr Adei to confirm the council’s decision, Dr Boohene stated that he refused to write the letter because to him the appointment was invalid because he had not received the new terms of the contract.
The witness agreed with counsel that before Dr Adei was re-appointed, he had occupied and performed the functions of Rector without any protest from him (Dr Boohene) nor the council.
When counsel suggested to the witness that he refused to write the confirmation letter to Dr Adei because of a bad relationship between them, Dr Boohene replied that although the relationship was not the best, that was not the reason but that he had insisted that the right thing be done according to the laws of GIMPA.
He said it was true that some council members had expressed concern about the bad blood between them and because of that a committee was appointed to see President Kufuor about it.
“The Rector accused me of wanting his job so when we went to the President, this matter was discussed,” Dr Boohene said.
When he was asked whether he would have dismissed Dr Adei if he had the power to do so, he replied, “This is a difficult question, but any reasonable person who is the head of an institution has the moral right to do what is correct and that is what I would do,” adding that he had not had the time to assess Dr Adei’s performance as Rector of GIMPA.
Dr Boohene described as partly true the fact that he had refused to sign some minutes of GIMPA Council meetings because to his mind they were not correct.
Regarding Dr Adei’s professorial title, Dr Boohene said some members of the GIMPA Academic Board had come to him on the issue, and when counsel put it to him that those members could not be council members, the witness replied that some could be.
Dr Boohene said the council did not require Dr Adei to bring his professorial title for revaluation and added that he was unaware that Dr Adei had said his title was conferred on him by GIMPA.
Asked what he thought about the suit against them, Dr Boohene said he was puzzled by it and that he did not know Mr Faibille until the suit, although he had been reading the Ghanaian Observer, which he found interesting.
When counsel further asked him whether what the newspaper had been writing about Dr Adei was accurate, Dr Boohene replied in the negative, but when pressed further that he had been feeding the newspaper with that information, he said, “If I were not in court I would have said that this is absolutely nonsense.”
According to him, it was wrong for the Ghanaian Observer to say that Dr Adei had not been appointed, saying that any such information was misleading and he had not seen one.
“I am tired of the place,” he said about GIMPA, saying that even though GIMPA was not a big place, there were always problems.
Dr Boohene said as chairman of the council, his power overrode that of the council, but when asked to indicate the source of that information, he could not provide it.
Dr Adei will open his defence at the next sitting.