One of Ghana�s well-known entrepreneurs and politicians, Dr. Papa Kwesi Nduom, last Saturday asked Ghanaians to decouple politics from the implementation of the Pension Law, Act 766.
That when done, he said, will ensure that the country and its people get the intended benefits of the Pension Law.
He said this during a special two-hour discussion on the Pension Law which he hosted on Amansan TV on Ghana, Great & Strong on Saturday, 22 November.
The guests on the programme were Chief Economist with Bastiat Institute, Dr. Tweneboa Senzu, General Secretary of Concerned Teachers Association, Mr. Raymond Boakye Danquah and a social worker Mr. X Shalom Konu.
The panellists agreed that the overwhelming majority of the 26 million Ghanaians do not have any real pension to fall back on and so traders, fishermen, farmers and others rely on a family system that is no longer reliable and are often destitute during old age.
Therefore, formal sector pension programmes must be well implemented to encourage those in the informal sector to trust their money to pension fund managers.
They called on the Mahama administration and government workers to adhere strictly to the provisions of the Pension Law which allow both employers and employees to have a say in pension fund decision-making regarding choosing of trustees, custodians and fund managers.
Dr. Nduom recounted how the Pension Law came into being.
According to him, the Pension Law was as a result of the 2002 National Economic Dialogue, which dialogue proposed a long-term savings tied to retirement project to end labour agitations.
That, he said, led to the putting into place the Pension Commission led by Dr. T. A. Bediako.
In the estimation of Dr. Nduom, one important objective of the Pension Law is the provision of long-term capital for the Ghanaian private sector.
�The whole idea was to ensure that workers will retire with a better pension package than was being made available through SSNIT and to provide a privately-managed long-term pool of funds that the Ghanaian private sector could fall on to finance their enterprises,� he said.
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