Is it ex gratia or honorarium?
We are at a loss and, perhaps, confused as to the nature or kind of financial reward received by 22 members of the Executive Committee of the GFA at the end of their four-year service to Ghana football.
Is it ex gratia, as we are being made to understand, or honorarium, the amount of $15,000 paid to each of the football servicemen totalling $330,000?
If it is ex gratia, where the understanding is that it is a favour being done to the servicemen and not recognition of any obligation on legal basis, then the general outcry that the payment is on the high side must be making some sense.
On the other hand, if it is honorarium, then it presupposes that they are being paid as professionals in return for their voluntary services to the GFA.
We are no lawyers, nor are we pretending to be legally astute or learned, but our layman understanding of the two terminologies makes us wonder what exactly the payment to the servicemen connotes.
Meanwhile, the FA president seeks to explain elsewhere in this paper that the payment of the amount is no big deal and that the money has been raised from the association’s own “internally generated funds”.
That must sound a very good and cogent argument to make, since the amount is not from government or public sources but the FA’s own as a favour to the ex-servicemen, for which reason it is being touted or couched as ex gratia.
Like the FA, we are tempted to go along that path, but where we part ways is when we assume that the payment is only a favour by the FA and not an obligation legally binding on it to pay willy-nilly.
It is precisely the point which has necessitated the loud voices against the mouth-watering gesture. After all the FA is under no obligation to pay such high fees at a time funding of football projects has been challenging.
We beg to disagree with the FA boss that the amount paid to the exco members “is even small” and the attempt to rationalise it by comparing it to what pertains at FIFA is rather unfortunate.
But are we to take it that it is an obligation on the part of the FA to pay its members for the four years of work since, according to the president, the decision to pay was taken at a GFA congress earlier and for which the first payment was done in 2011?
If that is so, such that at the end of every four years exco members have to be settled without fail, then we dare argue that the quadrennial exercise of financial expenditure on FA members ceases to be ex gratia but honorarium.
We stand to be educated on this, just like other followers of Ghana football, including the President of the Ghana Weightlifting Federation, Ben Nunoo Mensah, who are beside themselves with the huge payments made by the FA to the individuals (see page 12).
As Mr Nunoo Mensah unequivocally pointed out, he had no problem with the payment of per diem, “but when it becomes ex gratia for something which is supposed to be voluntary, we must discourage it”.
His sentiments are predicated on an International Olympic Committee Charter which directs thus: “People who opt to be in sport must do so in the spirit of voluntarism.”
We can’t agree more!