According to Mr. Stephen Ashitey Adjei, the arguments that the team’s abysmal
performance is due to bad coaching and the supposed bad captaincy of Andre Dede Ayew are all fallacies.
“The real reasons are spiritual – the early exit is one of the ramifications of curses that the suffering ex-workers of the GPHA have been invoking on the country over the injustice that they have been subjected to in the last 20 years, and this is just one of many evils that can befall Ghana because the Muslims among us, the Christians among us and the traditionalists among us are all praying to God to give them justice against the government of Ghana,” Mr. Ashitey Adjei wrote in a statement.
The GPHA ex-workers in question are about 4,000. In 2002, while the Kufuor government was in office, they were retrenched.
However, for reasons that have never been explained, only 5 of the ex-workers out of the about 4,000 were paid their severance benefits.
The remaining ex-workers, some of whom have died from abject poverty, have
remained unpaid even though along the line, former President John Evans Atta Mills had issued a fiat to the Transport Ministry to pay them.
“We will continue to invoke the justice of God over this country until the right thing is done. Those who think that we are joking should continue to tickle themselves and laugh but let notice be duly served that for the injustice done to the ex-workers, worst is yet to come,” Mr. Ashitey Adjei wrote.
The retrenchment was said to have been a World Bank program with the required funds for it provided.
However, rather than pay the ex-workers their retrenchment monies, the GPHA mostly gave them just handshakes.
In response, the ex-workers started agitating and as a result of the agitation 5 of them were paid.
“The big question that the GPHA has since not been able to answer is that only 5 ex-workers were paid? They have not been able to answer this because there is no reasonable answer at all except for the fact that they picked out those that they thought could fight for their rights and paid them off. But it is not only them who can fight off their rights.”
As part of their agitation, the ex-workers have written to Parliament and to the
presidencies of former Presidents Mills and Mahama. But after President Mills had issued a fiat for them to be paid, he had suddenly died in office and left the baton to his Vice John Mahama.
“John Mahama is the worst of all the Presidents who have been involved in our issue. He swept aside Prof. Mills’ fiat for us to be paid and refused to even reply a single letter we wrote to him,” Mr. Ashitey Adjei wrote.
He questioned the intelligence of the action of the former President thus, “between him John Mahama and Mills, who is a legal luminary? Professor Mills was a Law professor while John Mahama is a historian.
The question then is, if the Law Professor had issued the fiat for us to be paid, then on what basis did the historian overturn that fiat?”
According to Mr. Ashitey Adjei, the ex-workers highly suspect that the refusal to pay them had both corruption and political underpinnings but that the corruption was more compelling.
“It is true that former President Kufuor, whose nephew, Ben Owusu Mensah was in charge at the GPHA at the time, may have thought that some of the GPHA ex-workers were pro-NDC and therefore paying them would be doing good to opponents, but the evidence to this effect is not really that compelling. But if you look at the lengths that the GPHA went to ensure that we are not paid, you just can’t help but see that there was some cover-up at play.”
As part of the GPHA’s moves to ensure the ex-workers are not paid, it hired a lawyer for the ex-workers when the ex-workers had decided to litigate. Albert Adaare, the lawyer, strangely committed procedural errors until the Supreme Court had to dismiss the case on grounds of the procedural error.
Even so, while giving judgement, then Chief Justice, GEORGINA Wood who had expressed indignation at what is seen as Adaare’s deliberate hatchet job to sabotage his clients, advised the GPHA to negotiate with the ex-workers and pay them. The GPHA has since refused.
“And so 20 years down the line, only 5 out of the about 4,000 GPHA ex-workers who were retrenched in 2002 have been paid. Many have died out of melancholy, while most of those still living are in abject poverty. It is these living ones that go on their knees everyday and invoke curses on Ghana,” Stephen Ashitey Adjei wrote.
He confirms that like former Presidents Mills and Mahama, the ex-workers have also written to President Akufo-Addo about their plight but Jubilee House is yet to answer. “And as for those ex-presidents who have contributed to our woes, especially Kufuor and John Mahama, we leave them to their conscience.
Anytime they receive their retirement pay, they should ask themselves whether it is fair that they are able to enjoy such fat retirement packages while the poor GPHA ex-workers, including those who have gone mad from melancholy and those who are forced to live under trees, wallow in poverty. "we also do not forget the silence of the so called moral society of Ghana – the pastors, the fetish priests, the imams – why have they kept quiet over this injustice when people are dying because of such wickedness from our own government?” Mr. Ashitey wrote. Read Full Story
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