Bolga Central MP Isaac Adongo says the El-Wak recruitment stampede highlights deep institutional weaknesses that Ghana must urgently correct.
Contributing to JoyNews’ Newsfile, he argued that the country’s management of mass national exercises shows a long-standing pattern of ignoring warning signs.
He stated that past recruitment drives should have alerted authorities to the risks associated with large applicant numbers.
“Everything shows that the previous numbers were even bigger, I mean, 90,000 across the country,” he pointed out, noting that earlier events succeeded only because circumstances happened to favour the organisers.
For Adongo, this reliance on chance is untenable. He warned that assuming a system is effective simply because nothing went wrong in the past is a dangerous approach to public administration.
“Because we were lucky before, we thought the system was perfect, and we didn’t learn the lessons that could have informed future events,” he said.
The MP called for reforms that compel institutions to analyse every major public operation and adopt improvements before repeating them.
“We must have at the back of our minds that at the end of any exercise like this, we need to learn lessons and be better at it next time,” he stressed.
Adongo urged stakeholders across all sectors to acknowledge these gaps and implement stronger planning structures to prevent further loss of life.
