A former Chief Justice, Sophia Akuffo, on Friday, February 10, joined Pensioner bondholders to picket at the Finance Ministry.
Members of the Pensioner Bondholders Forum are picketing at the Finance Ministry for the fifth time, demanding that their investments be completely exempted from the Domestic Debt Exchange program.
The former Chief Justice speaking to the press threatened to sue the government if pensioners’ funds are included in the Domestic Debt Exchange Programme.
She described the government’s decision as inhumane, sheer wickedness and outright disrespectful.
“The Minister of Finance should better go back to the drawing board and come up with a better proposal otherwise nobody is going to agree to it. I am encouraging people not to agree with it. A contract is a contract, and it must be respected and if you want to renegotiate, come to the table with humility and come with ‘yesable’ proposal,” she said
She also blamed the government for messing up the economy and attempting to forcibly include their pension funds in the domestic debt restructuring exercise.
“We have had our ups and downs. A lot of us were from generations where we were encouraged to save for tomorrow and all that. We have been through times where all your savings become nonsense because of some government policies, then over the years, bit by bit, people have become more confident in the economy and investments.
“Quite a number of people here today, when they retired last two years, they have put everything into government bonds. It is a contract and now all of a sudden, you virtually want to force them to agree with you that the repayment of the yield of their investment should be as you dictate it. Why?”
“Why are we in the mess? Nobody has fully explained to us, yes we took debt, what was it used for? And where is the accountability? Exactly what was it used for? You are not telling us about how you are going to be able to make things better but just that ‘help me and I help you’, no, you help yourself first, let me see you doing something serious because we have seen these sorts of things too many times.” She continued.
“I am over 70 years now, I am no longer government employed, my mouth has been ungagged, and I am talking, and I am saying that we have failed, and it is important that the elderly should be respected. I find this wicked, I find it disrespectful, I find it unlawful, I find it totally wrong.”
Sophia Abena Boafoa Akuffo JSC was the Chief Justice of Ghana from 2017 until 20 December 2019. Prior to that, she had already been a Judge in the Supreme Court of Ghana since 1995.
She is currently the Governing Committee of the Commonwealth Judicial Education Institute and the Chairperson of the Alternative Dispute Resolution Task Force. She was one of the first judges of the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights in January 2006. She was to hold this position for two years but was re-elected and served as Vice-President and President of the Court till 2014.
On May 11, 2011, she was nominated as Chief Justice of Ghana by Nana Akufo-Addo and sworn in on 19 June 2017 as the thirteenth Chief Justice of the Republic of Ghana.
Madam Sophia Akuffo urged the government to be transparent and account to Ghanaians as to what caused the current economic crisis and how all loans were spent.
