Nice Try, Mr. Pratt, But No Thanks!

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

Garden City, New York

Oct. 25, 2014

E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

In the wake of recent revelation that the Mahama-led government of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) had dipped its kleptocratic fingers into the pension funds of Ghanaian workers, the owners of the said funds decided to have their second-tier pension funds (whatever that means) entrusted with managers of their own choices. This way, the workers aptly surmised, they would be able to have their future's nest eggs wisely and profitably invested.

This, in essence, appears to constitute the present bone of contention between public-sector employees and the Mahama government, which has resulted in the decision by some 12 labor unions to embark on an industrial strike action. As usual, the government, which is the main employer of these workers, has curiously decided that since it is the sole owner of production capital - in classical Marxian terms - that is the primary factor by whose direct means the pension funds were and/are generated - it stands to reason that the employer continue to be afforded exclusive and peremptory proprietary rights to enable it to prevent its employees from taking decisions that these employees deem to best serve their future needs and interests.

This, in brief, is the cause of the raging impasse between the 12 leading Ghanaian labor unions and the government of the National Democratic Congress. We also need to point out that this problem is hardly unique to the country's public-sector employees and the government. It is decidedly a global problem. It has also captured the forecourt of conflicts between U.S. public-sector employees and both federal and state governments. And so it is rather silly for hired government hacks like Mr. Kwesi Pratt to facilely suppose that the decision by Ghanaian public-sector workers to take charge of their pension funds in ways they envisage to best serve their interests was, somehow, politically instigated by the country's main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) in order to score cheap political points.

Mr. Pratt's argument that there is absolutely no evidence that "the private sector will better manage the funds more efficiently than what the government is doing or has already done" is patently absurd, at once scandalous and morally inexcusable. Ghanaians have come astronomically far enough away from Nkrumah's faux-socialist First Republic, when the infamously extortionate and thoroughgoing corrupt regime of the so-called Convention People's Party (CPP) effectively controlled the destiny of both the Ghanaian public and civil servant, to be taken so cheaply for granted.

Needless to say, we are in a new authentically democratic dispensation in which the Fourth-Republican Ghanaian worker has every human and constitutional right to determine who manages his/her pension funds. And the latter right is both inalienable and inviolable. The Ghanaian worker, per a legitimate contractual agreement with his/her employer, the government, regularly exchanges his/her labor in return for salaries and wages and other forms of contractually sanctioned emoluments, parts of which are withheld in the form of pension funds.

That the Ghanaian worker, either because of coercion or civic ignorance, had not exercised this inalienable right to individual and collective self-determination in the past, does not not in any way authorize the government, or the major employer, to continue to trample or ride roughshod over these rights in perpetuity. And it is very offensive for brazen freeloaders like the editor-publisher of the so-called Insight newspaper to suppose that he can expediently cajole the diligent Ghanaian worker into obsequiously accepting such paternalistic status of virtual economic enslavement.

I am also quite certain that there are rules governing the conduct of private managers of public employees' pension funds on the books, which are more apt to hold these private managers or companies to a higher level of responsibility than what the Ghanaian worker has experienced and/or endured at the hands of the faux-socialist government of the National Democratic Congress so far.

It is also rather silly, annoying and insulting to the intelligence of the diligent Ghanaian worker and the latter's labor union leaders for Mr. Pratt to condescendingly assert that "there is a deliberate attempt by the opposition New Patriotic Party to misinform the workers in order to make political gains," and also that this is "unfortunate, useless, unnecesary and must be discouraged." What arrant nonsense!

______________________________________________________________