$57,000 vehicle too basic for Westel's MD

URSULA`S AMAZING PACKAGE!

The Chairman of the Board of Westel, Mr. Sekyere Abankwa, who quintuples as the Board Chairman of Ghana Export Promotion Council, Board Chairman of Ghana National Petroleum Company, Board Chairman of State Transport Company, Board Chairman of Saltpond Offshore Production Company, Board Chairman of yet another ailing Metro Mass Transit Company, confirmed in an interview with the Chronicle last week that he and his board approved the mouth-watering package for Ursula Owusu, the Acting Managing Director of the second national operator, a development that has set the staff of the company on edge.
Within the last few weeks, workers of Westel have petitioned the President over the high spending ways of the Acting Managing Director and her management style costs ‘30 or 50 percent of company’s total revenue goes into her salary, travel expense, residence maintenance and extravagant lifestyle. Knowing that Westel is being put out for sale, the Ag. MD is hastening to amass enormous wealth before the new investors’ take over.
The compensation package for the 44-year-old boss of Westel reads like that of the World Bank Resident Director except that he answers for every hour that he stays in Ghana, and is held strictly accountable for the exacting Governance criteria that makes no room for abuse.
Last week, Ursula, who has tied her board in stitches, having dropped the name of Akufo-Addo like an amulet, had engendered some kind of fear around her. (The former Attorney General okayed her dollar-denominated pay check for her and it has stuck). The fear is that the NPP frontrunner will be next President and will wave off any institution empowered to look for proper accountability.
This could be deduced to be the rational behind Mr. Gabby Otchere Darko (cousin of the NPP presidential frontrunner) would circulate Ursula’s response to the petition to press houses. The petition by the Concerned Workers itself was not published, but it was the responses to it that received coverage and placed Mr. Otchere Darko in the disingenuous position of batting on the side of Ursula.
The Chronicle learnt that barely a week ago, she signed for and collected a cool $35,000.00 as her leave allowance and bonus and twitched her bum to the gaping staff who helplessly looked on as she pocketed the money, wondering what happened to their plea for intervention.
‘Your Excellency, Ms Ursula Owusu openly boasts that she is only accountable to the authority that appointed her, the President of the Republic of Ghana, so she is untouchable and will not budge to the checks being put in her way by anyone at Westel.
Mr. President, in the name of God, and in the Supreme interest of the people of Ghana, we the concerned workers of Westel, citizens of Ghana, are therefore compelled to petition your good self and the Government of Ghana, currently the sole owner, to interdict Ursula and quickly set up a forensic audit team to thoroughly investigate all the issues we have raised,’ they begged the President.
While Ursula blatantly refused to respond to this reporter on many of the allegations against her, the details of the package and information of her efforts to suppress and cover her tracks leaked to The Chronicle.
Her ‘daily foreign travel allowance of $2,000, and her annual bonus of $21,000.00, annual leave allowance of $35,000, (compare that with what Ministers and MPs earn –a sixth of that for at least three hundred dollars a day!), ¢10 million a month fuel allocation.
To cap it, the MD rejected a Toyota Landcruiser 4x4 purchased at $54,000 on the grounds that it was too basic. She personally went for the top of the range super luxury Land Rover Discovery 3 at a walloping $93,000.00 (ninety-three thousand dollars)!
That was the 29th paragraph of the workers’ petition to the President.
That is what ferries the goddess to her office at Heritage Towers, Ridge to her furnished Cantonments residence.
Gabby’s treatment of Ursula’s reply to the worker’s petition was a sad exercise which gave away her true macho persona.
At paragraph 29, she replies;
‘The Toyota Land cruiser was returned for two (2) Toyota corollas to be used by two heads of department. The Land Rover was suggested by members of staff who were more knowledgeable about cars than I was, on the grounds of fuel efficiency, ruggedness, durability and style. They were of the opinion that we could derive much more value from it for much longer than comparable vehicles. I deferred to their superior knowledge and approved its acquisition. I had earlier sought and obtained board approval for the purchase of vehicles for all heads of department, freeing up more cars for general use. We had also previously acquired three pick up trucks for the use of Engineering and Operations department. Judging from the tone of the ‘petition’, the authors could only be content if I walked barefooted to the office.’
The response was so insulting to the collective intelligence of the staff. Ursula owned up on Radio Gold when she threw a tantrum and wondered why The Chronicle did not publish Gabby’s letter.
She cleverly dressed up the super luxury Land Rover marque which set the company back by $93,000 and proceeded to go into details with inconsequentials about vehicles she had purchased for the departments, an unnecessary diversionary tactic, which in no way addresses the charge of waste!.
The reason why the workers found this item as the height of waste was that barely six months after her appointment; she rejected a 2005 Grand Cherokee which had developed a minor fault which PHC Motors was working on. Ursula decided to take them to court for a refund, and it still stayed at PHC Motors, and the workers suspect that she could get someone to buy it for her. But her response was a torrent of abuse.
‘Only a truly warped mind can come to this bizarre conclusion’.
The circumstances leading to the sale of the Westel vehicle, an Audi A4 (number withheld for security reasons), was sold to her and, ultimately, her mother’s use of that vehicle gave the workers grounds for suspicion
Workers of Westel have indicated that the lady whose name mimics that of the patron saint nursing the sick and teaching young girls (St. Ursula patron, saint of nursing the sick and teaching girls) is rather terrorising them.
The only hint of nursing was when she claimed a refund for ¢35 million for her mum’s surgery at Lister Hospital.