Ex-gratia payment should be based on performance – Prof. Baah-Boateng

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Professor William Baah-Boateng, an economist at the University of Ghana, has said that the ex-gratia payment that is given Article 71 office holders should be paid based on the performance of the regime if the clause is not going to be scrapped entirely. 

This call comes on the back of Alban Bagbin, who stated that the payments to Article 71 officeholders should be scrapped or reviewed, insisting they no longer serve their intended purpose.

According to him, the original intention behind ex-gratia payments for certain public servants and political officeholders was to combat corruption, but this is no longer the case in the current dispensation.

Speaking to Bernard Avle on the Citi Breakfast Show, Prof. Baah-Boateng highlighted the financial burden such payments place on the government, especially when multiplied by the number of recipients every four years, which significantly adds to election-year expenditures.
 
“Even if you want to pay ex-gratia, I don’t think we can just make it a blanket kind of thing. For example, when you are leaving office, we pay you GH¢200,000 or GH¢300,000. It should be based on the performance that you’ve made as far as the management of the economy is concerned. I will say that if the country doesn’t have that kind of money to be able to cough out that much money, then it shouldn’t. Multiply GH¢200,000 by the number of people that are supposed to be paid. So, it means that at the end of every four years, the government would have to spend a lot, and that even adds up to the expenditure that we experience in election years. 

“So, as a country, we need to take a decision, and it needs to be fast because it is just a thank-you thing and not something compulsory,” he stated.

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