Kan Dapaah: MPs' GHS7k salary 'ridiculous'

A former Member of Parliament has described the salary of Ghana's lawmakers as absurd.

Mr Albert Kan Dapaah told Ekow Mensah-Shalders (EMS) on Class91.3fm's Executive Breakfast Show (#EBS) on Tuesday December 15, 2015 that: "The salary is ridiculous."

"You cannot get him [the MP] to be very, very serious with that sort of money," the former Afigya Sekyere West Constituency MP said.

According to him, "the parliamentarian is the only person who doesn’t spend his salary on only his family, because he has to share it with the constituents."

"If you pay them the monies that we are paying them – and the last time I checked, I think it was about GHS7, 500 a month – then they will take the car loan from it, then you pay your driver, then you pay for fuel, you have to go to your constituency, if you are an Ashanti, you must be there every weekend for funerals. And when you go to the constituency, it is not just one funeral, it is about 10 funerals. And the MP cannot give less than GHS100. So, you can spend about GHS 4,000 on donations. The money is not enough.

"Why don’t we have about half the number that we have and double everybody's salary, even if we don’t have money?" Mr Kan Dapaah suggested.