Once again, Mr. Atitso Akpalu’s article captioned “Call for Pension Scheme for Ghanaian MPs: A Comparative Analysis” Modernghana.com 1/29/25) left several significant aspects of the subject out of the equation vis-a-vis the two distinctive categories of Members of Parliament under Ghana’s present 1992 Republican Constitution, namely, “Executive Members of Parliament or the Legislature” and “Ordinary Members of Parliament.” By “Executive MPs” is meant those legislators who are also Ministerial Cabinet Appointees of the Government Du Jour. To the latter, one may also add Non-Cabinet Holders of Ministerial Portfolios, such as Regional Ministers and Deputy Regional Ministers, as well as, of course, Deputy Ministerial Cabinet Appointees.
Now, we highlight the latter category of “Hybrid Ministerial MPs” because we reliably learned in the wake of the Daniel Yaw Domelevo-exposed “Double-Salary Drawing Scandal” at the end of the previous John “European Airbus SE Payola” Dramani Mahama regime, that legislators who also doubled as cabinet and deputy cabinet appointees were paid additional allowances, although such perks were much lower than the double salaries being illegitimately and criminally drawn home regularly by the Mahama cabinet appointees.
Another problem with which we are confronted here has to do with the fact that while just like the United States of America, Ghana maintains an Executive Presidency, when it comes to Congressional or Parliamentary Representation, the United States does not so brazenly blur the fine distinction between both the Lower-House of Congress and the Senate or the Upper-House of its Bicameral Legislature as has been routinely done since the beginning of Ghana’s Fourth Republic. In Britain, on the other hand, which maintains the Westminster System of Governance, with the British Monarch being the ceremonial or the titular Head-of-State, in reality, it is the Prime Minister and his Associate Members of Parliament, serving as cabinet appointees, who run the government, with the Prime Minister reporting the activities of his government to the Representatives of the People on a weekly basis or periodically.
This was precisely what Ghana’s first postcolonial leader, Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah, sought to avoid, thus his strategically self-serving declaration of Ghana as a “Republic” within the British Commonwealth of Nations in 1960. In other words, the declaration of Ghana as a Sovereign Republic also marked the ominous beginning of the Nkrumah-led One-Party Dictatorship of the Convention People’s Party (CPP). So, any patriotic bona fide Ghanaian citizen who thinks and believes that Mr. Mahama’s announcement that he is looking forward to lavishly celebrating Ghana’s Republic Day in July 2025 is a worthwhile investment of Ghanaian taxpayer money, had better think twice about the dire implications of the celebration of the motive behind such a bizarre and sinister declaration.
Now, I don’t know how British Parliamentarians who double as cabinet appointees are able to effectively and efficiently do their jobs as well as they are generally reported to do. Chances are that the job of a British Parliamentary Representative may very well not be a full-time job, just like some State Legislative Assemblies right here in the United States of America, such as New York State. Which means that, by and large, lawmakers are able to reasonably and rationally divide their time between representing their people in the New York State Capital of Albany and doing the sort of heavy-lifting that the job requires in their home districts and constituencies.
In Ghana, on the other hand, we learn that the job of a Parliamentarian is a full-time job. Which means that for the most part, our National Assembly Representatives are holed up for most of the week in our nation’s capital of Accra, with little to absolutely no time for anything else except to attend funerals and festivals on weekends and hope to have made themselves popular enough to be able to win the next election four years from hence. You see, here in the United States, a “Congressional Term” is only two years; so, serving in Congress for at least five years in order to qualify for a pension or retirement benefits means that a congressman or woman ought to have been elected and reelected at least twice to serve in the Lower-House of Capitol Hill. The work of a Congressional Representative or a US Parliamentarian is obviously a pressure-cooker enterprise, unlike in Ghana. For a Senator or an Upper-House Member of Congress, one term in office is six years. Which is not as easy as it sounds, since a Senator, and there are only two of them for each and every State of the Union, has to finance his/her electioneering-campaign exercise or war statewide, which requires millions of dollars.
On the whole, the idea of establishing a decent pension plan for parliamentarians and, in fact, for all civil and public servants, is not a bad idea at all. But it would be damn too naive for anybody to suppose that merely setting up a retirement or a pension scheme for some greedy bastards such as we all know on our Fourth-Republican political terrain, would be apt to make any leader “incorruptible” among us. Any studious observer of the global political arena has seen Senators and Members of the House of Lords and Prime Ministers and Presidents with lavish pension and retirement schemes available to them go to prison by the dozens.
If none of our topmost leaders have gone to jail or prison as of yet, it is not because we do not have any robber-baron thieves or crooks in our thoroughly corrupt part of the world. Rather, it is simply because those of our leaders who deserve to be serving life sentences in prisons have cannibalized our reins of governance. Which is why sometimes I dearly miss even Trokosi Nationalist Butchers like the Rawlings-Tsikata Sogakope Mafia Butchers.
By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
E-mail: [email protected]
