Comparing the minimum wage in Ghana to that of the US and other countries, I’m sure you’d be left in a shock. The minimum wage in the US today is 12 dollars per hour. Someone in Ghana is earning less than a dollar per day, how do we expect to got forward as a country with this.
18gh cedis today cannot even feed you twice a day. The best it can get you is one proper meal. Does this mean the average Ghanaian eats once a day? Yes. You’d be surprised to know how most Ghanaians manage to get afford food these days. Even basic human rights have become a luxury for us in this country. You speak to people about how they survive in this current economy and all they can tell you is, before they eat, they have to come up with a formation. It’s either 1:0:1, 0:1:1, or 0:0:1. These numbers represent how many times they eat a day and what time they eat. Most people either miss breakfast or lunch on a normal day just because they can’t afford to eat 3 times a day.
I don’t even wish to speak about the issue of electricity , transportation and water in our country. If the prices of goods and services are shooting up this way, the least we expect is to have an increase in the minimum wage. For individuals who have to journey to work always, the cost of fuel and transportation ends up taking up all their pay. I have a friend who used to drive his car to work. All of a sudden he started boarding a bus and so I asked what happened to his car only to find out it’s at home. He was like ‘ can you buy fuel’. It’s not even funny anymore at this point.
There are so many people out there who are homeless because they are unable to pay for their monthly rent. If it rains, these poor people have nowhere to go and you’d find them under the overhead in the rain and that’s where they would spend the night, out in the cold.
Honestly, the minimum wage in Ghana is really really low and something needs to be done about it. I think even a hundred Ghana cedis a day wouldn’t be enough but that would be okay for the average citizen. We need to look beyond what we see on social media and go into our communities to see what actually goes on there. You’d be brought to tears with the conditions in which people are living. This isn’t what are forefathers fought for. We need to do better as a country.
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