Fire IMF-Salaried Trades Union Leaders and Let Strike Participants Reapply for Their Jobs with Conditionalities

Organized labor has, for the most part, at least over the last half century, been a major socioeconomic parasite on the collective resources of our beloved Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana. So, its leadership would be making an egregious and a grievous mistake to even half suppose that the country could not cope or effectively function in its absence. To be certain, what Ghana presently and direly needs is a very lean civil and public service system and, in effect, the wholesale privatization of our entire largely fiscally sponging and unhealthily bloated and dysfunctional “Organized Labor System.” Expert Ghanaian economists, both within and outside the country, would painfully tell any influential policymaker who is willing to listen that a sizable chunk of IMF/World Bank economic assistance to the country regularly and almost invariably goes into the payments of the salaries and the wages of Ghanaian public sector workers, which includes the overwhelming majority of “Organized Labor.”

You would have thought that Monday’s call for a massive industrial action by the leadership of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) and its allied and associated groups would have been predicated on poor service conditions, rather than the purely legitimate sale of some poorly performing hotels and resort facilities by the management of the state-owned Social Security and National Insurance Trust (SSNIT) to a bona fide Ghanaian citizen, and not a white or European foreigner as has been the modus operandi of the nihilistic and kleptocratic and the kleptomaniacal leadership of the country’s main opposition political party, the National Democratic Congress (NDC). In short, we need to radically revolutionize what has been erroneously perceived and categorized as “Organized Labor,” which is really no efficiently organized system of economic production and productivity at all by, rather, a veritable “Public-Resource Sponging System of Economic Parasites.”

The abjectly wrongheaded decision by the leaderships of the TUC, the Forum for Public-Sector Workers (FPSW) and the Ghana Federation of Labor (GFL), must immediately lead to the suspension of the salaries and the wages of all the individual participants and the participating groups indefinitely, pending the massive dismissal of these workers and their immediate replacement from among the teeming ranks and pools of freshly minted or recent graduates of our nation’s colleges, universities and professional and vocational and technical institutional establishments, the overwhelming majority of whom are yet to be gainfully employed in the service and the disciplinary areas for which they were trained for a grueling number of years.

Even more significant, the leadership of the so-called Organized Labor, including the Ghana Medical Association (GMA) and the Ghana National Association of Teachers (GNAT), needs to be categorically and emphatically reminded of the fact that Ghana’s 1992 Republican Constitution does not inalienably entitle them and the members of their various guilds to any public-sector jobs. Which means that the lame-duck Akufo-Addo government must be prepared to “import” replacement workers from outside the country, especially replacement healthcare workers, if it cannot find enough qualified workers to fill the positions of the voluntarily striking workers. Such replacement workers could come from such ECOWAS subregional countries as Nigeria, Cameroon, Liberia, Sierra Leone and the Gambia and elsewhere in the ECOWAS subregion, as well as competent and qualified professionals from such African Union (AU) countries as Kenya, Ethiopia and Tanzania, for only a handful of the most obvious examples.

It is downright despicably absurd that the same Organized Labor Leadership who are now, reportedly, calling for a massive downing of their Industrial Tools, as it were, did not raise a single finger in the runup to the 2016 General Election, when then President John “I Have No Classmates in Ghana” Dramani Mahama, Mr. Haruna Iddrisu and Prof. Joshua Alabi literally and criminally lifted the whopping amount of $72 million (USD) from the vaults of the Social Security and National Insurance Trust with impunity and reckless abandon, money that belonged to both public and private sector retirees and pensioners and actively engaged public and private sector employees and entrepreneurs. Now, this goes to show us all where the real and true priorities of these shameless parasitic labor union leaders lie.

Even more significant to highlight here is the rather lurid and immitigably asinine belief by Dr. Yaw Baah, the TUC’s Secretary-General, and his rascally largely male and pro-Mahama and pro-NDC associates that, somehow, they could strategically and mischievously leverage a highly charged Election-Year Political Climate to make such gratuitous demand as causing the summary scrapping of the perfectly legitimate transactional agreement struck between Rock City Hotels Limited Liability Company and the Social Security and National Insurance Trust, entailing the offloading of majority shares in some four poorly performing SSNIT-owned and operated hotels and resorts. Now such politically calculated protestation is criminally absurd, if also because it is led by the very same National Democratic Congress-sponsored Member of Parliament for the North-Tongu Constituency, in the Volta Region, a staunch backer and possible accomplice or active participant in the $72 million (USD) SSNIT Mega-Heist and the Chief Supervisor of the withdrawal of the age-old Teacher-Trainee Allowances, who may also very well have been one of the double-salary scamming Mahama cabinet appointees.

It is equally ironic to recognize the fact that Mr. Okudzeto-Ablakwa belongs to the same political party and State-Capturing ideological camp that criminally and unconscionably dismantled the Kwame Nkrumah established seminal industrial hub that was the Ghana Industrial Holdings Corporation (GIHOC), comprised of some 120 factories and industrial plants that were sold at giveaway, flea-market prices to foreign entrepreneurs, largely Europeans and Americans.

You see, the problem that Atta-Mills-backed criminal scofflaws like Samuel Okudzeto-Ablakwa, Edward Omane-Boamah and the rest of the hoodlum pack of the NDC apparatchiks, led by Johnson “The Mosquito” Asiedu-Nketia, the National Chairman of the National Democratic Congress, and the Serial and the Dynastic Presidential Candidate of the latter party, John “European Airbus SE Payola” Dramani Mahama have is their withering inferiority-complex-bred inability to savvily recognize the fact that it is far much wiser and better to have an entrepreneurially competent and generously talented bona fide Ghanaian citizen like Mr. Bryan Acheampong, the US Marines veteran and the current Minister of Agriculture, acquire majority shares in the poorly performing SSNIT hotels than having a complete foreigner or total stranger with no personal emotional attachment to the country snap up majority shares in these prized national treasures. How psychologically slavishly minded!

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
July 13, 2024
E-mail: [email protected]