TUC Has a Right to Demand Livable Wages

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

Dr. Clement Apaak is grossly misguided to assert that the "TUC has no moral right to threaten [the Mahama-led] government" of the National Democratic Congress (See "TUC Has No Moral Right To Threaten Government - Clement Apaak" Adomonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 4/28/14). For those of our readers who may not have either heard of or read about the man, Dr. Apaak is one of those fat-sinecure recipient hangers-on called "Presidential Staffers." The latter are apparently paid to intimidate institutions, groups and organizations perceived to be either hostile or significant threats to the fortunes of the corrupt well-heeled and powerful in society.

Invariably, the filthy rich and powerful are composed of executive parasitic operatives like Dr. Apaak himself, politicians (especially of the ruling party) and their allies in the corporate world. Dr. Apaak is grossly misguided because the 4-day ultimatum given President Mahama to up the wages of the Ghanaian public-sector employee by the leaders of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), is absolutely not based solely on any "moral right" that these union leaders may perceive themselves to wield over the government. Rather, such demand is squarely based on the practical realities of the day-to-day existence of the Ghanaian worker in today's Ghana.

It is therefore criminally preposterous for Dr. Apaak and his ilk to cavalierly suppose that they, somehow, have the constitutional and inalienable right to live high on the hog, as it were, while the rest of Ghanaian citizens go to bed hungry, sleepless and wracked with nightmarish hallucinations. It is also rather comical for presidential hangers-on like Dr. Apaak to accuse public-sector workers of unconscionably mounting pressure on his boss, because it is the high-flying President Mahama, rather, who has vigorously and gratuitously mounted pressure on the Ghanaian worker by making it extremely difficult for the latter and his/her family to eke out a decent living.

Presently, the average Ghanaian worker can scarcely hold his/her head above the proverbial waters of acute poverty. The Ghanaian worker is, truthfully speaking, scarcely different from a slave. And the grim fact of the matter is that this is the Twenty-First Century where every hardworking human, irrespective of class or social status, ought to be paid a livable wage, be s/he a public-sector employee or a private-sector employee. It is also rather silly and vacuous for the notoriously talkative presidential staffer to charge that "labor has the responsibility to ensure that its members maximize productivity," without expressly or specifically explaining to the TUC membership where labor productivity has woefully fallen short, and also why those in default have not been brought to book by management.

Then also, it is very insulting to the intelligence of Ghanaians for Dr. Apaak to accuse TUC leaders of mischievously attempting to "unnecessarily prejudice the minds of Ghanaians and sow seeds of discord by describing Ghana as a failed state." The obvious implication here is that, somehow, Ghanaians are too stolid and daft to realize that they are being had, as it were, or literally being strangled by penury as a direct result of the abjectly poor economic policies of the Mahama government.

And, by the way, when TUC leaders lament the fact of Ghana's having been callously plunged into the Stygian and chaotic realm of failed states, they are not, in any way, either proscribing or unpatriotically undermining the legitimacy of the country's geopolitical sovereignty. They are simply driving home to a largely extroverted and absent-minded government, the fact that nearly half of the country's 24-million and odd citizens go to bed hunger-wracked and physically and emotionally harried every night.

Even diehard National Democratic Congress apparatchiks like Mr. Ekwow Spio-Garbrah have been reported to have said that unless the best and the brightest talents among the membership of the party were rallied to service in the Mahama government, the NDC is highly unlikely to be returned to power come December 2016. This is what the so-called presidential staffers ought to be fervidly worried about, and not the inescapable fact of the imperative need of the TUC leadership to fiercely fighting for livable wages for its membership. This is a moral imperative, not a gratuitous threat against the Mahama government, as Dr. Apaak would have the rest of us believe.

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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
April 28, 2014
E-mail: [email protected]
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