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10.04.2021 Feature Article

Ex-Presidents Must Not Become Burdens on Taxpayers

Ex-Presidents Must Not Become Burdens on Taxpayers
10.04.2021 LISTEN

The statutory precedent whereby former Presidents become economic burdens on the country for life, which often means at least for a generation or roughly 25-to-30 years, is a slavish national policy that must be brought to an immediate end. For the simple reason that even career politicians are not civil and public servants in the traditional sense of the term. They are hired temporarily on contractual basis; and whatever privileges and perks that come with their job description must end with the terms of reference of their tenures in office. They can be granted a one-time gratuity lump sum of a reasonably determined multiple times of their annual base salary at the time of the expiration of their employment or social contract with our Republic.

They must not be put on a regular salary for the rest of their lives. If these former Presidents want to be availed a regular source of income, they need to buy into the kind of social security policy benefits that retired civil and public servants like the justices of our judicial system and the personnel of our security agencies have, and not become burdensome parasites on our national economy, such as Mr. Kwame Baffoe – aka Abronnye DC – the Bono Regional Chairman of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP), alleges to be the case with former President John Dramani Mahama (See “Mahama’s Monthly Salary Contributing to Ghana’s Rising Debt – Abronnye” Ghanaweb.com 3/30/21). According to Mr. Baffoe, the former President is paid GHȻ 30,000 Monthly, minus other perks and bonuses, by the country’s Treasury Department or the Ministry of Finance, whichever may be the case. I am assuming that this would most likely be either the Ministry of Finance and/or the Bank of Ghana.

Couple the preceding with payments allegedly made to some unspecified number of aides and employees of the former President and, by the lights of Mr. Baffoe, the nation spends at least a whopping GHȻ 100,000 every month on the man whose late former mentor and prime benefactor, to wit, former President Jerry John Rawlings, perennially and incessantly and virulently and contemptuously described as the most thoroughgoing corrupt politician in postcolonial Ghana. Now, the aforementioned amount of money, that is, GHȻ 100,000, is a little over $17,000 (USD). Multiply $ 17,000 by 12 months, and we arrive at $ 204,000 (USD) which, Abronnye DC tells us, amounts to a humongous GHȻ 1.2 Million annually. We need to, of course, factor in the annual and/or periodic inflationary rate, and we are talking about one heck of a ginormous fortune.

But that is not even where the crux of our problem resides. It is clearly the fact that as a career politician, Mr. Mahama has been mired neck-deep in a legion of criminal creaming of the nation’s meager financial resources, such as the globally infamous European Airbus Payola Scandal, in which the extant Vice-President Mahama is reliably alleged to have been paid approximately € 5 Million by Europe’s largest aircraft manufacturer in exchange for ensuring that Ghana waived its right to competitive bidding involving the purchase of some three military aircraft on the global market. What this means is that the Atta-Mills government of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) may very well have ended up purchasing the three aforementioned military aircraft at an amount that could very likely have purchased at least one or two more military aircraft.

It is a “reliable allegation” because the forensically indisputable evidence was officially released by UK’s Serious Fraud Office of the Crown Court or the British judicial system, with the unimpeachable backing of the latter’s sister courts in France and the United States of America. We must also definitively put on record that the forensic evidence in question was directly and personally released, unsolicited, by the appropriate Crown Court authorities to the recently resigned Independent Special Prosecutor, Mr. Martin ABK Amidu, the expelled and thoroughly humiliated former Atta-Mills’ Attorney-General and Minister of Justice in the pay of the National Democratic Congress. A staunch lieutenant and protégé of the late President Rawlings, Mr. Amidu would flatly refuse to indict and prosecute Mr. Mahama because even as he told the global Ghanaian community in the runup to the 2020 Presidential Election, Mr. Amidu had wild expectation of a landslide win by Candidate Mahama and, perhaps, his appointment to a plum portfolio by the very Atta-Mills’ lieutenant who, in the wake of the “mysterious” demise of his immediate boss and his own “auspicious” accession to the Presidency, had, by the public testimony of Mr. Amidu himself, threatened the life of the man who would later call his magnanimous rehabilitator a Biblical serpent-head of apocalyptic proportions.

At any rate, what makes the call for the scrapping of Mr. Mahama’s burdensome parasitic retired president’s privileges warrantable or even imperative, is the fact that the National Democratic Congress’ Parliamentary Minority Caucus’ Members are stridently and self-righteously and hypocritically calling for the reining in of the skyrocketing National Debt Stock, about the same time that the globally credible Forbes List of the Richest Ghanaians put the worth and the wealth of a faux-socialist Comrade Mahama in excess of $ 1 Billion (USD). We are also talking about the man who, according to Mr. Baffoe, that is, the Bono Regional Chairman of the New Patriotic Party, doled out tens of mini-pickup trucks and unspecified amounts of wads of liquid cash in payola payouts to dozens of disgruntled and failed New Patriotic Party parliamentary candidates, as well as party turncoats, in a scandalous bid to getting himself nonconsecutively returned to Jubilee House so that he could correct his past mistakes.

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

March 30, 2021

E-mail: [email protected]

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