Nana Osei Bonsu, who runs the Private Sector Federation, is basically fed up with how pensions are handled in Ghana. He’s saying, look, why are we parking all this pension money in government securities when the private sector’s gasping for air? Makes zero sense.
He was on PM Express (yeah, that JoyNews show everyone’s mom watches) just laying it out: Businesses in Ghana are getting squeezed. Borrowing cash? Forget it the rates are brutal. And even if you can stomach the rates, good luck finding anyone who’ll actually give you long-term money.
“It’s like, capital is expensive, and there’s just not enough of it floating around,” he pointed out. And he’s not wrong. Everyone’s talking about inflation or the cedi, but nobody’s fixing the pipeline for real investment.
His big idea? Shake up the pension system. Seriously, there’s a whole ocean of cash sitting in these pension funds, but instead of letting Ghanaian businesses swim in it, we just hand it over to the government to buy more T-bills. That’s not what these pensions were supposed to do, especially not the third tier. The private sector was supposed to get a slice of the action he helped design the damn thing!
Here’s the kicker: the private sector’s got, what, 35% or 36% of the pension pie, and it’s still not making a dent. Why? Because the money’s not actually getting to the businesses that need it. It’s just getting recycled into government debt. Snooze.
He’s basically begging for change. “Can we please get more people involved in the third tier and actually put this money to work?” he’s asking. The point is, if you flood the private sector with proper capital, business owners wouldn’t be crawling around begging for loans. Plus, if you stop starving them, maybe just maybe interest rates won’t be so sky-high.
So yeah, while the bigwigs keep patting themselves on the back for fixing inflation and the cedi, real businesses are still stuck playing musical chairs with funding. And Nana’s over it.