“Executive Must Have a Pay Cut by 25% To Prevent Economy from Getting Worse” – Professor Stephen Adei

In the job sector, when there’s recession, slowdown or whatever you may want to call it, when the economy is suffering, the effects of this are layoffs, hiring freezes and pay cuts.

Employers sometimes forced staff to reduce salary if they want to avoid letting employees go altogether.

Pay Cuts

Pay cuts are something companies are very cautious about it especially during a recession or other extreme situation where a company is under pressure.

It was in this perspective that, Professor Stephen Adei the Chairperson of the National Development Planning Commission, has added his voice to calls for Government to reduce its expenditure in order to improve on the performance of the economy.

Prof Adei was speaking in an interview with Raymond Acquah on JoyNews’ UpFront on Wednesday, 16th 2022, he disclosed “Why should a country like Ghana have about four or five ministries of transport? … It’s incredible. In other countries, we have one minister, and then we have technical heads of these institutions. So we can reduce the size of government … Actually, under this circumstance, I think that the executive and other things must have a pay cut; maybe 25% will do.”

He stated that, if Government does not consider a reduction in some of its expenditure, the economy may experience a further decline; which could lead to a worsening of the current situation.

“If you are exceeding your income, then you must accept to live below your income, which is the easy way, otherwise if you are earning GHC3,000 and you are in debt of GHC10,000 you cannot day to day spend GHC3,000. For you to get out of the rag you will have to cut your expenditure to GHC2,000 because you must service your debt. So we are in that situation as a country”, he said.

Prof. Adei added, “…And they [Government] must thank God that this crisis has come now and not 2023, because if they don’t go for the hard one now, which normally will take about 18 months to go over this type of hunch, then they have a good chance by the middle of 2023 to see some good results in 2024. If not, things would get worse and they want to prevent being thrown out of government, they would be thrown out anyway.”

“Free SHS is wonderful. Because if it was there, I would have gone to secondary school, not teachers’ college. But we have to look at it again. I think that there are certain schools, which we should make them autonomous and fee paying and people will go there, but then make sure that there are good community schools for everybody else”, he advised.

By: Michael Djan

French Tutor and Digital Marketing Blogger/Content Writer and GhanaWeb Blogger @ frencheducationgh.com