Convener of the Individual Bondholders Forum, Senyo Hosi, has called on Ghanaians to be more patriotic and selfless towards national issues.
Speaking in relation to the government’s domestic debt exchange programme and the consequent pushback it suffered from primarily middle class individuals in the country, he noted that the unionizing of the middle class against the government’s tyranny was largely triggered by parochial interests.
He explained that had most individuals not been directly affected by the debt treatment, the government would not have suffered the level of pushback it did.
According to him, Ghana would not have been at this juncture if the middle class had shown this level of interest in the country’s economic management right from the beginning following series of warnings from academics and civil society leaders.
“I think we have a selfishness problem, a bit of it is allowed but I think we don’t have a strong sense of country as we pretend to have. When we have to step out, the next thing everybody is asking is ‘what will happen to my business in case these people come for me? I’m not the one who will solve Ghana’s problems’. But when we carry on this way, what kind of life are we leaving for the generations.
“Look at the act of government in this thing, there is a strong case for it to rather show leadership and sacrifice its own comfort by taking fiscal adjustments; we didn’t see our politicians do that. Then our fathers, when this crisis came, they who actually have a lot more access to network, a lot more access to experience, who could have brought it to help deal with this national catastrophe, we also saw them rather say that they were in to just take care of their own self, ‘we’re pensioners, we’re the only people you should take care of as this point since you’re doing this’ and that was what happened.
“Who is really thinking about the generation after? Our parents forgot about us, they forgot about their children, and they were thinking about themselves. Our government forgot about the people who put them there and were just thinking about their own personal comfort. It is the same thing that happens every time,” he bemoaned on JoyNews’ PM Express.
