Presidential pay cut; A worthy example
It was less than a month ago that some of us were all over the place urging our President to make a gesture to discontented labour to head off an eagerly anticipated nationwide industrial action. Last Tuesday, the President did just that.
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He cut his own pay, and those of all his appointees, by 10 per cent. It is a powerful political gesture which has confused his detractors. We are being told that the percentage is not enough, and worse, that it is rather the allowances which should have been cut.
One would have expected those who were opposing this move to make better the personal sacrifice of President Mahama by cutting their pay by at least 11 per cent. Not a single one of them who is paid from the public purse, had even offered to forgo one per cent of their salaries to add to the savings that would be made each month. Herein lies the insincerity and duplicity of those who are opposing this gesture by the government.
We should be comforted however, that in our 4th Republic, we know the salary levels and payments for top public officials. It took the coup of January 13, 1972, which overthrew the government of Prime Minister Busia for Ghanaians to learn that the civilian politicians had paid themselves for the full five-year tenure of the government, and in foreign exchange to boot. We are making progress.
I was quite happy to learn that the savings would be applied to the vexed problem of maternal health care and related issues; a continuing scar on the massive resources we devote to health and education each year.
The voluntary pay cut, however, came after the expected national strike had been aborted with the 25 per cent reduction in utility tariffs earlier last week. This was followed by a parliamentary approval of a 2.5 per cent increase in the rate of the Value Added Tax to howls of protest from the Minority in Parliament at the weekend. Some of us are ardently in favour of the nihilistic option of our government closing down to force a political change. It is not a wish that the majority of us who believe in structured and lawful change would grant them.
Whereas this gesture impressed upon my mind that our leaders are quite capable of making worthy and useful gestures for the common weal, a few other things caught my attention as the Finance Minister, Seth Terkper, read the budget last Tuesday.
Dr Bawumia’s lecture on the podium of the late Vice-President Aliu Mahama Memorial Lecture last week, had raised the fanciful red herring of the desirability of having economists as managers of our public resources. I was amused by this navel-gazing exercise which sprung, not from knowledge of our own specific history and of other societies, but the need for some of us to play the card of pointless narcissism when it suits us.
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The most influential finance ministers in the history of this country had not been trained economists. My own uncle, Komla Gbedemah, our first indigenous Ghanaian Finance Minister, did not even go to the university. Professor Kwesi Botchway is a lawyer, and Mr Osafo-Marfo, an engineer. As an aside, Mr Osafo-Marfo’s successor, the late Kwadwo Baah-Wiredu, was an accountant. On the contrary, the portfolio of economic planning was taken away from the trained economist and the finance minister in December 1971, because he disagreed with Prime Minister Busia on the quantum figure for the devaluation of the cedi, which led to the January 13, 1972 coup.
Since some of us are so much in love with Western examples, I am sure we would be tickled to learn that the great Winston Churchill also never went to the university, but on his way to becoming prime minister in 1940, he became the chancellor of the Exchequer in the 1920s, and is now considered as the best at the time in English political history.
It is clear that effective political leadership has never depended on the fund of knowledge acquired in any area by its holders, but solely on the ability to manage people and resources to desired ends; a skill that every parent exercises every day in our own small apolitical ways. When it suits some of us, we use lack of expertise in any area to beat up on politicians. But that is misplaced energy.
Another matter which caught my attention was the establishment of the special fund to support infrastructural development. I have always suspected that the tardy way we manage development projects contribute greatly to corruption in public finances.
I do agree that our huge recurrent expenditure has always been a drain on the steady supply of resources to complete on schedule, and within costs, desirable projects. As Vice-President Amissah-Arthur remarked the other day, our inability to give dedicated attention to important projects have over the years deprived us of the benefits of the ‘supply response’ envisaged at the inception of projects.
If this envisaged fund enables us to break away from old and current patterns of funding projects, then we are well on our way to expeditious management of project implementation, and saving ourselves considerable leakages in our scarce resources. If this budget cycle ends with the successful inauguration of this supercritical fund, I would be quite content that our political leadership has come to effective grips with the structural defect in our development aspirations.