Mr Elvis Van-Lare, Volta Regional Secretary of the Ghana Trades Union Congress (GTUC) has suggested that the nation brainstorms for a better way of commemorating the country’s independence.
He said nationwide parades of school children, usually under the scorching tropical sun “certainly has outlived the times.”
Mr Van-Lare was speaking to the Ghana News Agency (GNA) in an interview on the eve of Ghana’s 57 independence anniversary which falls on Thursday.
He said he believed the independence parades were now only opportunities for politicians to play with words as “they have nothing new to tell anybody”.
He replied with an emphatic “no” when asked if the Ghanaian worker’s situation was better today than at independence.
“These past 57 years, governments have been telling us workers things would improve, when we know and feel that life is getting harder for many of us year after year,” Mr Van-Lare lamented.
He said real incomes of workers had been sliding and quality of life was hardly improving.
“Indeed workers at the time of independence reflected more confidence in themselves, lived better than today,” Mr Van-Lare stated.
He said he could not understand why the situation of the worker in Ghana was always hovering in and out of the bottom-line when the country had a lot of resources.
“Even now Ghana is exporting crude oil, but its benefits to the ordinary person are not visible,” he added.
Rather than the workers having some respite from the exploitation of these resources, they “are under the scourge of bi-weekly increases in fuel prices, making them distraught”.
“Ghana at 57 is crawling, seriously crawling when other countries are galloping,” he stated.