Like many Ghanaians, I am appalled by the sheer opulence of the gratuities the Chinery-Hesse Committee awarded to our MPs, in general, and ex-president John Kufour, in particular. I join my compatriots, therefore, in calling upon President Atta Mills swiftly and firmly to use all constitutional and legislative avenues open to him to review the awards substantially down to a level that is modest and affordable.

I do not think that we need any reminding by Mr. Kufour that the 1992 Constitution provides (Article 4, in fact) for payment of gratuities to MPs. (The 2001 edition of the New Oxford Dictionary of English defines “gratuity” as ‘a sum of money paid to an employee at the end of a period of employment.’ Whether our MPs are employees of the State or of the People of Ghana in whom Sovereignty resides is another question altogether.) The real contentious issue here, however, is the utterly grotesque level of the awards.

This raises a question about the considerations that influenced the determination of the awards, especially the package for ex-president Kufour. As far as I am aware, the minutes of the Committee’s meetings have not been made public. Consequently, one can only make deduction based on known facts.

To my mind, the size of the awards bears the hallmark of networking and culture of impunity so often demonstrated by our elected and non-elected officials in recent years. In this regard, let us look at the position of the well-connected and influential chairman, Mrs. Mary Chinery-Hesse. Mr. Kufour brought the dear old lady on board as advisor some time after her retirement as deputy director-general at the Geneva-based International Labour Organization, presumably on the basis of her international high-level connections, especially within the United Nations system. She quickly became the grande dame of ex-president Kufour’s kitchen cabinet. She fell headlong for the seductive advances of power. She revelled in her newly found exalted position and the trappings of office that go with it: a chauffer-driven car, with police escort, at Ghanaian taxpayers’ expense. She never missed an opportunity to impress that her advisor’s position was equivalent to that of prime minister. She even envisaged or envisioned aloud a state funeral for herself if she died in “office”. (We will never know how much she earned as advisor and whether she paid tax on it until parliament passes a Freedom of Information Act.)

Considering the fact that Mr. Kufour elevated her to the position of “prime minister” in his government and she enjoyed his confidence, it would seem very natural for Mrs. Chinery-Hesse to use her position as chairman of the committee to show gratitude and to reward Mr. Kufour, damn the cost to Ghanaian taxpayers and the funding needs of our schools, public universities, hospitals, etc., for making it possible for her to indulge or massage her substantial ego. She knew that Mr. Kufour was in his last term as president. Somehow, she must help keep alive or sustain the presidential status of the man who gave her so much power: ‘the King is dead; long live the King.’ Otherwise, how else could one explain why a former and well-respected senior international servant, who should be champion of transparency, frugality and accountability in government, would preside over such outrageously obscene package for Mr. Kufour?

Be that as it may, justifying MPs’ gratuity awards while keeping mute about his own ostentatious package, Mr. Kufour was reported as saying that MPs deserved their awards, the reason being that in spite of their hard work they were paid meagre salaries (“meagre” salaries compared to our university lecturers, medical doctors and other public sector professionals?)

This argument seems disingenuous. If, as he claimed, MPs (nearly half of whom were former ministers and deputy ministers) were paid pittance for their hard work (translated as corruption, absenteeism and subservience to the president, uncritical support for his policies and Bills, etc.), surely there must be some rational explanation as to why our politicians fight tooth and nail, resorting in some cases to intimidation of opponents, bribery, rigging, even soliciting the intervention of supernatural powers of “juju” men and witchcraft, just to ensure election to parliament.

On Mr. Kufour’s submission, our MPs must be a bunch of masochists! But I do not think so. Nor do I think that they are motivated by civic duty. Otherwise, they would all have taken shovels, brooms and other tools, rolled up their sleeves and cleaned up our gutters and general environment choking with an unimaginable filth, instead of scrambling to enter parliament! That would have been real and beneficial service to their communities. So, there must be some tangible and irresistible attraction somewhere that induces our politicians to stop at nothing to become MPs. I believe that the prospects of a ministerial or deputy ministerial appointment, meaning access to power and ministerial budgetary votes, allowances, car loans, which most of them never pay back, anyway, are the coveted prize to be won and well worth fighting for. In other words, our politicians use all manner of means just to get elected to parliament, driven not by a sense of duty to serve their communities or the electorate, but buoyed by a vaulting ambition to strike it rich for themselves, their families, friends and cronies.

So often in life, except the privileged few, we are confronted with situations in which we are compelled to make sacrifices or hard choices in order to attain a prized objective. A parent may be forced to deny himself/herself a much-needed pair of new shoes in order to have money to pay his/her child’s school fees. Our MPs fight to get elected to parliament, knowing full well that the salary there is meagre. That is their sacrifice if they are truly committed to service to their electorates and the country at large. I do not believe that our MPs are poor by any Ghanaians standards. So, I do not see what ex-president Kufour was complaining about. If our MPs feel, however, that they deserve salary increase, they should follow the normal and transparent route by tabling the increase in parliament. They should not seek effective salary increase through the back door opened to them by Chinery-Hesse. Mr. Kufour should stop being an apologist for our greedy MPs, including himself.

Ex-president Kufour’s defence of MPs’ awards rings hollow in the face of what we saw happen in his own ruling party NPP during the 2008 presidential race. His Party levied a staggering Cedis 50 million “registration” fee on each of the 16 presidential aspirants seeking NPP nomination. They all paid up, and these gentlemen went on to splash out in the most vulgar manner imaginable billions and billions of Cedis on their campaign. If our MPs are paid so little, Mr. Kufour should tell us where all that money came from. Did it come from cocaine or government coffers or both? Surely, Mr. John Kufour must know. We want to know, too.

In the same defence of the awards, ex-president Kufour was also reported as taking Ghanaian workers to task for being unproductive, probably implying that they had no moral grounds to criticize the sumptuous and ostentatious package his “prime minister” Chinery-Hesse cooked for him. For someone who had been in politics for forty years, eight of those as president, Mr. Kufour showed remarkably little sensitivity to, or understanding of, the difficulties Ghanaian workers go through daily in order to get to work.

I know personally some workers (and there are tens of thousands more) who have to wake as early as 4 o’clock in the morning (without taking a proper shower, as their water taps are dry for weeks and months), walk two, three or four miles in order to get to work on time, where they arrive sweaty and already tired from insufficient sleep and long walk. After work they trek back to their slums the same way. Some lucky ones make it home by clinging densely and precariously to our slow rail wagons like bees to a hive. They do this 5 or 6 days a week. Yet Mr. Kufour could not understand why these people were “unproductive”.

The situation of those Ghanaian workers who can afford a “trotro” fare or who have their own private means of transport is not so dissimilar. Whether they take a “trotro” or drive their own cars, these workers spend hours on the road in scorching heat and choking traffic, not to mention daily exposure to high dose of carbon monoxide emitted by snarling vehicles, before arriving at their respective places of work. Maybe, Mr. Kufour could also tell Ghanaians the measures he put in place as president to enhance the quality of life of Ghanaian workers, a necessary elementary element for enhancing productivity.

In this regard, my challenge Mr. Kufour and our MPs is that from now on they should drive in Accra like the rest of us without police escort clearing the streets of other vehicles for them to race through. They would hopefully have a better appreciation of one of the many difficulties Ghanaian workers go through daily.

In conclusion, the trend of the debate on the Chinery-Hesse gratuity awards shows that most Ghanaians condemn them for their lavishness, especially ex-president Kufour’s. Now, it is time for action. President Atta Mills has many important and pressing problems on his plate at the moment, requiring his undivided attention. The awards issue is a nuisance and unnecessary diversion government could do without. Our economy is not in the best of health. The global economic downturn has hit all countries hard but the underdeveloped countries harder than others. Even if our economy could sustain such lavish awards for our MPs, how would they compare to the situation of other groups within our society? Have our MPs elevated themselves to the status of a privileged class? We are solidly behind the President on this issue. He should not succumb to threats of legislative blackmail by our greedy and self-seeking MPs.

Cedric Tsuo