He explained that if that too were the case, the country would have been picketing at the Ministry of Finance.
“As an independent nation, Ghana is 66-years-old. If our country was a person, she would have been on retirement, and perhaps, be picketing at the finance ministry to be exempted from the haircut,” he said.
The journalist’s comments, although were made in jest, were on the back of recent happenings at the Ministry of Finance, when some retiree individual bondholders picketed at the ministry for a week, asking the finance minister, Ken Ofori-Atta to reverse his decision.
The pensioners were at the ministry over the decision of the government to include their bonds in its recent Domestic Debt Exchange Program (DDEP), hopeful that the government would heed to their appeal and exclude them from it.
On the last day of their picketing at the ministry, the immediate-past Chief Justice, Sophia Akuffo, made a surprise stop at the venue, joined the pensioners in solidarity.
She used the opportunity to announce that although she was not going to be personally affected by the DDEP, she also felt that she needed to speak out for her other colleague retirees.
She also said that while the sitting president, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, was the one who gave her the appointment as Chief Justice, she is no longer gagged from speaking about the decisions of the government.
It is worth noting too that in the meeting where Manasseh Azure Awuni made the above statement, the former CJ, Sophia Akuffo, was also in attendance.
Manasseh Azure was speaking at the University of Ghana 75th Anniversary Public Lecture on Ghana’s 66th Independence on the theme, “Our Ghana: Reflections on Integrity and Resilience.”
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AE/WA
Manasseh Azure Awuni is an anti-corruption investigative journalist