In 2018, Ghana caught the attention of the world. For the same reason, the world hailed the country again in 2019. US news tabloids like Bloomberg, New York Times, and World Economic Forum etc. ran stories on Ghana’s economic growth success. At 8.8%, the IMF projected Ghana to be the fastest growing economy in the world. What a great feat for an African nation like Ghana. Everyone was proud of Africa’s first independent nation, south of the Sahara.
What spurred the euphoria was the belief that economic growth ultimately stimulates economic prosperity, which will trickle down to everyone in the country especially the poor. More economic growth meant incidents of poverty would further tumble. People in villages could anticipate having electricity for the first time in their lifetimes. It meant more rural folks would leave water bodies they previously depended on, for the cows only. It meant no farm produce would go waste in the village because the government would tar the muddy roads.
But the reality showed us something different. Ghana’s short experiment with ‘miracle’ growth rates has further shown that without government intervention, high economic growth may not result in prosperity for the poor. Excerpt from the Ghana Living Standards Survey (GLSS) Round 7 indicates that growth elasticity of poverty (GEP), a measure of the percentage change in the rate of poverty linked with 1% change in per capita income or GDP was 0.17 percent between 2006 and 2013. From 2013 to 2017, it worsened, plummeting to 0.07 percent.
And according to a report by Oxfam International, the poorest Ghanaians would have to work for a thousand years to earn the equivalent of what Ghana’s richest men make in a month. This may sound dramatic to your ears but the reality of economic inequality in Ghana is very dramatic, hence must be told with drama.
World of Labour defines economic inequality as the unequal distribution of income and opportunities between different groups in society. It is measured with Gini Index or the Palmer ratio. According to the GLSS Round 7, Ghana’s Gini index stood at 0.43 as at 2017, which is a slight increment from 0.419 recorded in 2005. This means Ghana must introduce more pro-poor economic policies to redistribute the wealth, which in any case is built on the basis of collective effort but hijacked in the end by a select few. This way, the government could bring down the index because, an index within the range of 0.4 to 0.5 like Ghana’s, indicates a large income gap between the rich and the poor.
In Ghana, probably having its beginnings from pre-colonial days, economic inequality is a phenomenon that has structurally become entrenched in every aspect of the country’s present-day economy. Starting perhaps with feudalism where a class of subject people served the economic interest of a certain Royal class, economic inequality began to gradually change our preceding communalist way of life. It got intensified during the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.
With colonialism, it got entrenched. Statutory apparatus imposed on colonies such as then Gold Coast only acted to reinforce economic inequality. For instance, British colonizers on April 1, 1852 passed the Poll Tax Ordinance to extort money from the already impoverished Gold Coasters. Because the colonized people derived little benefit from it, their resistance saw the ordinance withdrawn in 1861. The losers of the system were the wretched of the earth, who are always the overwhelming majority. You can guess the winners; the European colonizer and the African comprador class. Natural resources of the colony were exploited, not for the benefit of the indigenous people, but for colonial powers residing in the metropolis of Europe and its local comprador class ally. It is therefore not a mere coincidence that of all the continents in the world, Africa has been the poorest. For instance, Nigeria with a population of 200 million overtook India with a population of 1.2 billion as the poverty capital of the world.
Like a shadow that never leaves even in darkness, economic inequality in Ghana today has become more pervasive than ever. We see it trails everywhere, anytime. In an Op-ed published in the Financial Times,
Ghana’s Finance Minister, Hon Ken Ofori Atta, while giving a sober reflection of COVID-19’s devastation of Ghana’s economy, gave us a hint of how bad economic inequality is, in the country. He recounted, “I drive into Accra, which is in lockdown – strange and eerie feeling of apocalypse. Where are the school children, the newspaper sellers, the beggars? Where are our youth selling everything from dog chain to gum?…”
Quite often, it is simply impossible to avoid the destitute. The torture of conscience one gets from locking eyes with the disabled beggar as the ‘Trotro’ (commercial vehicle) decelerate to a stop in traffic. Their eyes worn on faces that speak volume of untold hopelessness and deprivation. Or it’s one of their children creepily clinging on to you, not wanting to let go as if their whole life depends on that cedi. And yes, it does! Or the sweating bread seller, racing against a car to sell a loaf to a passenger.
The grim faces street hustlers make after being rebuked by drivers of luxury cars, whose windscreens they wipe in traffic to earn a living. These destitute include the blind, mad, disabled, malnourished, aged and juvenile. During the day, they beg for survival. And since many have nowhere to turn to, they normally pass the night on the street at the mercy of extreme weather conditions. It is an eyesore.
The recent outbreak of coronavirus has brought economic inequality to the fore. If we denied it in the past, now it is right before our eyes. Despite being some of best ways of tackling the outbreak, the restriction on social gathering and the imposition of lockdown presented two unpalatable odds to the poor. To stay indoors and die by hunger or go out and die by the virus. The government had to step in strongly to prevent a humanitarian crisis from occurring. When the President of Ghana announced a lockdown on four major cities in the country, casual workers in their hundreds of thousands had to throng to food relief centres, most often in a manner that flouted the social distancing protocol. Without working, the vulnerable cannot fund even their substandard lifestyles.
The most poignant lesson we should learn as country from these trying times of coronavirus pandemic is that the poor need more from us. Mere distribution of food to head porters on the street is good, but the answer to the problem demand we go beyond that. We have to start tackling the root of the problem with the aim at dismantling the structures that condemn millions to the rungs of poverty, while elevating very few to the statuses of multi-millionaires and billionaires. In this article, I have identified some obstacles that we need to break to reverse the increase in economic inequality. The following is an attempt at showing what government could do to break the structural base of economic inequality in the country.
Tax the church
According to the 2010 population census, 71% of Ghanaians identified as Christians, making the nation predominantly Christian. According to the Pew Center of Washington, there are about 15.5 million charismatics in the country as at 2015. This is true because charismatic churches, also known as ‘one man’ churches have eclipsed orthodox ones. This is more discernible when one takes a stroll on the street on a Sunday. Vehicular traffic comes to a halt as millions flock to churches. In Kasoa where I live, to escape the traffic caused by one charismatic church, ‘Resurrection Power Ministries’ on the Toll-booth stretch of the Accra – Winneba Highway, one must wake up and set forth at dawn. It has now become common for churches to hold services throughout the week. But with increasing church activities come the increase in financial obligation on congregants.
I found it hard to believe when a Christian friend told me that tithe paid to the church is 10% of one’s salary. The tithe, however, is one form of the several financial obligations on church members. Against this backdrop, the saying that one of the ‘easiest way to become rich in Ghana is to start your own church’ rings home more. Church members part ways with huge sums of money to land a consultation session with their pastors. Miracle-laden materials like anointing oil are very expensive to buy. The multibillion-dollar church industry is one built on the sweat, vulnerability and ignorance of many unsuspecting followers, yet serves the interests of a very few
Leaders of such churches have become rich overnight while the plights of members worsen by the day. But due to their strong convictions, many churchgoers refuse to acknowledge the correlation between their bad living conditions and their exploitation by the churches.
Many churches have diverted into business. Some have established private universities with the cost of tuition being on average, two times what is charged by the public ones. This makes access to university education at private universities two times difficult for children of the poor church members.
By allowing the church to operate as it is, government is contributing to the impoverishment of its people by virtue of its negligence. Government must tax the church in order to redirect the pool of wealth from individuals for national development that will benefit everybody and raise the Churches’ congregants from poverty. Taxing the church would be a hard nut to crack. It would definitely come with a very politically unpalatable repercussion for any governing political party that brave the wind to do so. But however unpalatable the consequences might be, it does not obscure the fact that taxing the church is the right thing to do.
Reform the educational sector
At the basic level, every Ghanaian student wants to attend one private school or the other. Public basic school are attended mostly by the children of the poor. After basic education, however this change.
Every prospective Ghanaian High School student wants to enroll in government schools. At the tertiary level the obvious choice for most Ghanaian students is public universities. This pattern of preference is not a happenstance or an isolated occurrence. Rather, it upends a deep structural divide in the country’s educational sector.
Despite huge government funding, public basic schools continue to record abysmal performance in national exams. What makes this perplexing is that most of the country’s trained teachers are employed in these public basic schools. Private schools with no government funding and less qualified teachers with meager salaries rather outperform public basic schools. It is not unusual to find Children of public school teachers enrolling at private schools.
Immediately I graduated from High School in 2015 I was offered a teaching position with a private basic school in Kasoa. I was delighted at first because the school was one of the prestigious private schools in the municipality. I however had to turn down the offer because of the unimaginable inadequacy of the salary offered. There was no way I would accept to work with such a remuneration of 80 Ghana cedis or 13 dollars a month. Today my high school classmate teaches in the same school has disclosed to me his salary is 250 cedis. Being three times what I was offered in 2015, it is still well below the average salary of a government basic school teacher.
The sheer numbers of students attending public basic schools makes the existing educational infrastructure inadequate. One only has to visit any public basic school nearby to get evidence of this. The last time I was at Odukponkpehe basic school at Kasoa, I met several pupils having to use the floor at the kindergarten section for lack of chairs.
In higher classes, three pupils had to manage desks made for two. Besides, the classes were overcrowded. Speaking to one of the teachers, he lamented the large numbers of the class hampered his ability to give effective tuition. It is impossible for one teacher to effectively dispense good class management and assess homework of a class of 200. At best, teachers would only do a shoddy work in assessing their pupils and at worse not assess them at all.
It is worth noting that some progress has been made in the public basic school sector. Gone were the days public school students had to go to school in shifts. Schools under trees used to be the order of the day. Today, majority of them have successfully been phased out. This Milestone however should not make us complacent about the challenge that lies ahead.
The situation is grim are at the countryside where the basic school are suffering from the paucity of School teachers. Problems like the unavailability of portable water, lack of electricity, poor telecoms infrastructure, bad roads and lack of services like banking etc. makes it difficult for government schoolteachers to accept postings to these areas to teach. Basic schools in these communities have either closed down for lack of teachers or have under-qualified teachers staffing them, contributing to the poor performance of public-school students.
In addressing this problem, government must in the interim provide incentives to teachers to who accept to teach and live in such areas. Medium and long-term solutions aimed at bridging the divide in Ghana’s educational sector must include a ban on the use of SHS graduates to teach in private schools. Private schools must have must hire trained teachers. Such a measure has the propensity to attract qualified teachers to private schools more, to the detriment of public ones, granted they are entitled to equal pay.
Therefore, government must invest in expanding the infrastructure of public school so that working conditions in both public and private schools are the same. This would put the brakes on the likely result of brain drain on public schools.
Another problem that might ensue is the fact that some private schools may be put out of business if they have to pay the salaries of qualified teachers. They have to charge exorbitant school fees to pay their teachers but doing so would make private education unaffordable and, in the end, collapse it all together. To deal with the inevitable hurdles that may result, government may want to compensate owners of private schools and then take over these schools. Nationalizing public education just as other countries have done would provide the needed equalizer effect on the widening education divide in the country.
Universal Health Coverage
The establishment of the National Health Insurance scheme, which was preceded by free maternity Healthcare Scheme was something that was long overdue. In a country where infant mortality and maternal mortality are amongst the highest in the world, with a host of other deadly but preventable diseases like malaria, rampaging and destroying the lives of millions, a free Universal Healthcare system should be the answer.
Within few months of the establishment of the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), millions of Ghanaians hopped on to it, signaling the dire health care needs of the people. Great strides have been made in improving the Healthcare outcomes of this nation yet much more remains to be done. The quality of service under the NHIS is increasingly becoming inadequate. This is not without a cause.
Growing delays in disbursing funds to the National Health Insurance Authority greatly affects the overall operation of the healthcare service providers under the scheme. Beneficiaries of the scheme have lamented repeatedly, about the quality of service rendered to them. Service one may get from the scheme is a free consultation with a doctor and some cheap medicines like Paracetamol. Service providers often also cite delay in the release of funds for the recurring problem of poor quality of service.
The Ghanaian taxpayer is the big loser here because whether or not the NHIS service providers deliver high quality of service, they will be paid regardless. Also, NHIS does not cover the treatment of many ailments. This has led to so many deaths, which could have been prevented and rendered the scheme useless for many.
One of the problems afflicting the NHIS is the shortage of health personnel. There is also a disproportionate distribution of health personnel across the country. They were only 15 doctors in the whole region of Upper West region making it the region with the worst doctor-to-patient ratio in the country. Considering the number of newly qualified doctors, it will take approximately 100 years for Ghana to which the world Health Organization doctor-to-patient benchmark. All these factors contribute to Ghana’s not bad health care outcomes.
However, with dedication and the will, we can transform this sector. To transform this sector however we need to institutionalize free and universal healthcare for all. To do this government must put up the physical health infrastructure needed. Abandoned health facilities need to be completed. New hospitals must be built at places where they are needed but non-existing. Indispensable in the running of this infrastructure is a human resource. To make up for the short fall in health personnel, Health Training Institutions must increase the number of people they train yearly.
Even National Development
To get a better view of economic inequality in the nation, one must just pay attention to the demographics. The more the rural-urban drift, the more the inequality in society. What causes this rural urban drift is something that is readily perceivable; uneven regional development. People migrate from the northern parts and the countryside to cities like Accra and Kumasi to seek greener pastures. Conditions at home are unbearable.
Take for instance the recent findings of myjoyonline.com that nearly half of Ghana’s agricultural produce go to Waste due to bad roads. For a victim of such a phenomenon, getting on board a bus headed for the city is a reasonable course of action. Rural-urban drift result in waste of labour as people who could be engaged in meaningful work back at home are employed in cities doing menial jobs for meager remuneration. To solve this problem government must promote the even development of the country. The over privatization of urban centers to the detriment of the Rural ones must end.
RAISE GHANA’S MINIMUM WAGE
The major driver of economic inequality is exploitation. People living in developing countries with high economic inequality are often exploited on two fronts; internal and external. Internal exploitation takes the form of local business people exploiting local workers. External exploitation takes place when foreign capital exploits local people at the micro level and the whole nation at the macro level. Let’s delve into internal exploitation.
According to Ghana statistical service, Ghana Labour Survey conducted in 2015, only about 1.5 million Ghanaians are employed in the formal sector. Of those in the informal sector, more than 70 per centare coping with ‘vulnerable employment’, which could also be referred to as underemployment. It generally comes with paltry or no compensation at all. When you factor the dependency ratio of 68.53 per cent into the fray, we can conclude that over 15 million people are living under conditions of poverty.
Minimum wage is a paltry 12.53 cedis a day. This compound to some 354 cedis a month when according to trading economics, individual living wage in 2019 was 900 cedis. This means that it is legal for a Ghanaian worker to be paid three times less what they need to survive. The state, which is supposed to protect Ghanaian workers by way of policy is rather aiding and abetting their exploitation.
This partially explains why 6.8 million, representing all most a quarter of Ghana’s population cannot afford a dollar a day, according to Ghana Living Standards Survey Round 7.
By: Osei Agyemang
Editor: Naa oo Naa Foundation
Source: Ghana/Starrfm.com.gh/103.5 FM
