The attendance records of the 27 council of state members paid GH₵ 9.7m ex-gratia

The relevance of the Council of State has come under intense scrutiny once again. Some say the body has become an assemblage of septuagenarians and political appointees who give non-binding advice to the president.

This conversation was resurrected after a former member of the council of state, Togbe Afede XIV, returned over GHS360,000 paid into his account as his end of service benefit. He maintained that the payment was “unconscionable.”

The Fourth Estate has also revealed how a member of the Council of State took the ex-gratia after attending only one meeting in four years.

In this report, Fact-Check Ghana has put together the attendance list and number of meetings of all members of the Council of State between 2017-2020. The information obtained through an RTI request, which the Council of State refused to give to The Fourth Estate was released when it was dragged to the RTI Commission.

The table below shows the total number of plenary and Committee meetings held from 2017-2020.

Source: Council of State

The table below shows the number of meetings each member attended between 2017 and 2020.

Table 2

Source: Council of State

Table 3

The table below shows the number of meetings the Economic and Sustainable Development Initiatives Committee members attended.

Source: Council of State