Plan for retirement: GES Director-General advises staff
The Director-General of the Ghana Education Service (GES), Prof. Kwasi Opoku-Amankwa, has advised staff of the service to plan adequately for their retirement.
He advised them not to wait till they were left with some few years before they started to plan for life after pension.
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“You don’t have to wait till the last minute before you start planning for your pension. If you do that, you will find yourself wanting. If you have about 20 years or 15 years to work and you put in a strategy by starting off something, it is most likely that by the time you finish active work, you will be able to put up a structure that you can lay your head,” he stated.
Prof. Opoku-Amankwa gave the advice when he opened a two-day staff durbar and business activation fair for staff of the GES at the forecourt of the GES headquarters.
Accommodation
He said the issue of people going on retirement without a house to sleep in was a general problem with the Ghanaian workforce and often, it was because they thought their income were low so they could not afford to put up a house with it.
“Sometimes, we also look at our age and think we have more years to retire and so there is more time. However, by the time we realised, the time is up for us to leave.
“We want to try to avoid this situation and that is the reason why we organised the fair. The moment you get a job, you should start planning your pension,” he explained.
Prof. Opoku-Amankwa said ever since he joined the GES, he had noticed that going on pension was almost a tango for some and the biggest challenge he learnt was that most of them did not have a place to lay their heads after retirement.
Estate property developers
He said often, people jumped to conclusion that it was expensive to purchase a house from estate property developers, adding that in their case, they would look at all the options available for their staff to explore.
Prof. Opoku-Amankwa gave an assurance that the service would give the staff all the support they needed to own property.
He added that the service would liaise with the Controller and Accountant General Department in that regard and also make sure that all the necessary documentation needed were available for the staff to begin the process.
The Director-General said the programme would be replicated in the regions so that staff of the service there would also benefit.
Six banks and seven estate developers participated in the fair and they took turns to explain the services they had to the staff.