A Member of Ghana’s Parliament on the ticket of the National Democratic Congress, Richard Quarshigah has defended government’s last minute decision to increase allowances of national service personnel in the country.
Government on Tuesday announced a 60 percent increase in allowances of service personnel effective January 2017. The announcement implies that each personnel who received GHc350 each month will now go home with GHc559.
Speaking on Eyewitness News, Mr. Quarshigah who is also the Member of Parliament for the Keta Constituency in the Volta Region and a member on the Public Accounts Committee said the amount will help NSS personnel manage their economic lives.
“Clearly the allowances of national service personnel must be good news for the personnel and the young people of this country. The fact that a new government is coming does not necessarily mean that some deliberate mischief is being done to tie the hands of the incoming administration. We’ve had a situation in 2008 when the NPP administration was exiting office and we saw contracts being signed to the point that a very major policy was introduced that was the single spine salary structure which in itself was something that a lot of people saw as not being appropriate at the time because it was signed just few hours to the government handing over.”
Mr. Quarshigah also rejected claims that the decision will over burden the incoming government and argued that the NPP could review the policy if it’s too much for it.
“If they think the allowance given the national service personnel is inappropriate or too much and the public purse cannot bare it, they should have room to do a review and they must be able to explain to Ghanaians why they are doing a downward review of an earlier decision taken by the previous government. So there is no tying of hands in this,” he argued.
The NPP had raised concerns over some supposed last minute contracts and appointments being initiated by the outgoing NDC government urging it to refrain from that.
But functionaries of the NDC have defended the actions saying they have done no wrong since they are still in power until they finally transfer power to the NPP on January 7, 2017.
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