Agyeman-Duah: Neutrality allowance is a ridiculous demand
The members of CLOGSAG have been beating the war drums over the non-payment of neutrality allowance since Thursday ( 21 April)
Professor Baffour Agyeman-Duah, a former UN senior governance advisor, has described the neutrality allowance for members of the Civil and Local Government Staff Association, Ghana (CLOGSAG) as absurd.
Speaking to Beatrice Adu on The Big Bulletin on Wednesday (27 April), Agyeman-Duah said, “this is the most ridiculous proposal I’ve ever heard. The so-called neutrality allowance that they’re claiming… that’s why earlier I made reference to the fact that the deputy minister of finance has retracted, saying that this is not the title they gave.”
“But if it were to be that the civil servants are asking for allowance just because they are made to be neutral in politics, it’ll be the most ridiculous demand I ever heard. You take a job and every job has its code of conduct or what you may call code of ethics, and if you sign and go in, you don’t turn around and demand something that the code of ethics has clearly laid out.”
Listen to Agyeman-Duah in the attached audio below:
“Negotiate for better salaries”
Meanwhile, a labour expert Yiadom Boakye Ansah has said the Civil and Local Government Staff Association, Ghana (CLOGSAG) must negotiate for a consolidated salary that comes with a better retirement package than pursuing allowances in addition to their wages.
Ansah said CLOGSAG must stop the over-dependence on allowances and rather negotiate for better salaries in order to avert being worse off after retirement.
His call comes after CLOGSAG embarked on a day’s industrial action over the non-payment of neutrality allowance.
“Already we have a very long allowances list that single spine tried to correct at a point in time,” Ansah said on The Asaase Breakfast Show on Monday (25 April).
“What single spine did was to categorise all allowances into four…, but at the time of implementation, the arrangement was that all category one allowances should be part of pay,.. just like neutrality allowance,” he said.
“So, if we had followed that programme, then with time we would have taken away most allowances, leaving only category 4, and that would have helped us to clean up the remuneration part.”
“So, the discussion should move from a consolidated type of salary rather than a split salary with several allowances. Now you take the money and spend and then when you retire you are given GHC500 to take care of yourself in a month, so we should stop the pretense,” Ansah told Asaase Radio’s Kwaku Nhyira-Addo.
He described the call for a neutrality allowance as misplaced.
Nicholas Brown
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