A Very Dumb Pension Proposal for Parliamentarians

He has been in Parliament and served in ministerial cabinet portfolios for at least two decades, or so. So , the question that we all must be asking right now is the following: Why has it taken Mr. Mahama Ayariga unusually and then unreasonably so long to come to the sobering realization that Ghanaian parliamentarians, and career politicians as well, are not entitled to their elective positions in perpetuity, and that sooner or later each and every one of them will be destined for retirement and be promptly replaced by a new set and generation of equally criminally corrupt career politicians, that is, if they do not die while performing their sinecures of a job? We already see the cynical and the hypocritical likes of “Lt-Col.” Johnson “The Mosquito” Asiedu-Nketia recruiting their foreign and expensively educated sons and daughters to replace them, just as he has already helped the late former President Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings do the same with his daughter, Dr. Zanetor Agyeman-Rawlings, and a nephew called Godwin Edudzi Tamakloe, who is presently Acting Chief Executive Officer of the Ghana National Petroleum Authority (NPA), courtesy of President John “European Airbus Payola” Dramani Mahama - (See “Mahama Ayariga Advocates Establishment of Pension Scheme for Retired MPs” Modernghana.com 1/29/25).

Several responses appear to me regarding the foregoing question, not the least bit of which regards the glaringly apparent selfishness of the pension-scheme advocate, the Dear Reader needs to put the emphasis on “scheme,” for retired politicians. You see, it obviously has taken so long for Mr. Ayariga, who presently serves as the Johnson “The Mosquito” Asiedu-Nketia-appointed Parliamentary Majority Caucus’ Leader of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC), because the Bawku-Central Parliamentarian eerily sees the clock of human mortality ticking at lightning speed and the proverbial handwriting on the wall closing in on both himself and a critical mass of his unconscionable associates of State-Capturing and pathologically kleptocratic politicians.

Now, don’t we all remember Mr. Ayariga hurriedly and indiscriminately signing some capital-intensive post-election contracts in the wake of the December 2016 seismic defeat of then President John “I Have No Classmates in Ghana” Dramani Mahama, as the then outgoing Minister for the Environment, Science and Technology? Guess what? Ironically, recently, the Upper-East Region native was widely reported by the media to have sternly cautioned an equally seismically defeated Mahamudu Bawumia-led New Patriotic Party (NPP) against the quite inviting temptation of signing some of the same socioeconomically and strategically sandbagging contracts that the Harvard University Graduate School of Law alumnus had vindictively signed way back in December 2016. Now, who wants to talk about hypocrisy and double standards?

Then also, another response to the proposal to establish a pension scheme for career politicians raised by the former Information Minister, if memory serves Yours Truly accurately, that comes to mind regards why paycheck deductions, as has been routinely done for all Ghanaian civil and public servants over the course of decades and generations, could not be done for our parliamentarians and other career politicians and, instead, a pension scheme has to be specially established that is tagged onto prospective and temporally uncertain revenue generated from carbon sale on the conspicuously erratic and historically and politically unstable International Market for these largely socioeconomic parasites of Ghanaian society?

As for the harebrained idea that, somehow, the mere establishment of a pension plan or scheme is apt to significantly reduce the insufferable spate of corruption among our public officials and career politicians, merely because a retirement scheme or pension plan has been established for them is patently absurd. As far as I have been able to ascertain in my six-decades-plus of existence, the kind of wanton thievery that goes on in Ghanaian political culture, especially in public and at the ministerial level, cannot be legitimately equated with “Public Service,” in the globally accepted sense of the term, at least not as ordinarily understood hereabouts the United States of America, Canada, Japan, Britain and China, to name only a handful.

In his proposal, at least as reported by the media, Mr. Ayariga makes absolutely no reference to the immediate and the summary scrapping of the much-maligned so-called Ex-Gratia Awards, so it is not clear to the listener and/or the auditor precisely what kleptocratic largesse is being given up in exchange for the privilege of the establishment of the proposed pension scheme. In Mr. Ayariga, by the way, we are also talking about a career politician in the pathologically criminal habit of importing under-invoiced vehicles into the country for himself, his cronies and his friends. And then when he is disciplinarily confronted with the errors of his ways, turns round to self-righteously make an infraction out of the age of a legitimately contracted Independent Special Prosecutor.

One would rather have a pension plan or scheme for career politicians that was strictly tied in with the radical and the total eradication of the environmentally genocidal activities of illegal small-scale mining or Galamsey, and not the intellectually and the socioeconomically benighted idea of regressing the industrial development of Ghana, so that a few parasitic and kleptocratic career politicians could be assured of comfortable bank accounts at the end of their dishonorable careers. We need to stop exporting raw cocoa beans like intellectually and woefully underdeveloped primates of the wild and start manufacturing finished multiplicity of byproducts from our raw cocoa beans for our local markets and Continental Africa at large. This is what the Tariff-Hedged Trumpian Revolution inescapably teaches us.

But , of course, if you still live in a community deeply mired and fixated on slaughtering one another with primitive bows and arrows and flint-guns, axes, machetes and pebble-propelled catapults, maybe this very simple idea of economic self-reliance may come as the sort of Rocket Science that is not taught on either the Bawku or the Bolgatanga Campus of the University for Development Studies (UDS).

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