My Grandfather’s Pension Was Named Kwame And Ama

My grandfather never opened a bank account in his life. He did not need one. His pension had names. Kwame, his first son. Ama, his last daughter. Six children in total, and he used to say, plainly, that God gives you many hands so that at least two will still be working when your own hands stop.

For most of Ghana’s history, that was not superstition. It was the actual retirement system. You farmed your land, you fed your children, and when your knees gave out, they fed you. Nobody wrote it down. Nobody needed to.

I think about my grandfather every time I meet a trader at Makola who has never heard of SSNIT.

She is not lazy. She is not foolish. She sells wax print six days a week, wakes before five, and closes after dark. But she is in the informal economy, the same economy that holds the vast majority of working Ghanaians, and almost nobody there has been signed up for anything resembling a pension. The latest data puts informal sector pension coverage at under seventeen percent, up from about thirteen percent the year before. Read that plainly. Well over eight in ten of the people building this country’s markets, driving its trotros, sewing its clothes, have no formal plan for the day they can no longer work.

She is not reckless. She inherited my grandfather’s plan. Six children. Two will still be working. It served her mother. It served her grandmother. Why would she doubt it now?

Here is why. Her children are not on the family land anymore. One is in Kumasi chasing a diploma, one is in Italy sending little money when he can, one has three children of his own and a rent bill that eats what he earns before it reaches his hand. The compound broke up. The obligation did not disappear. The capacity did. Ask any sixty-year-old parent today whether their children can carry them the way they carried their own parents, and watch the hesitation before they answer.

This is not a story about ungrateful children. It is a story about a plan built for one kind of Ghana, still being run in a completely different one.

I am not telling you to stop loving your family or stop leaning on each other. I am telling you that trust is not a plan. My grandfather’s system worked because everyone stayed close, land stayed in the family, and one income could stretch across a compound. None of those three things is guaranteed for you. So the plan built on them cannot be guaranteed either.

The good news is that you no longer need a formal job or a fat salary to build your own. NPRA-licensed Tier 3 personal pension schemes exist exactly for people like that trader at Makola. No payslip required. No office required. You contribute what you can, when you can, sometimes as little as the price of a bag of rice a month, and it sits with a regulated pension fund manager, growing quietly, completely separate from whatever your children later decide or can do.

Stay in it ten years, and it becomes fully yours, tax free, whether you were a trader, a dressmaker, a driver, or a hairdresser. You do not need SSNIT formal employment status to start. You need a name, a Ghana Card, and a decision.

So here is what I am asking of you this week, whether you are the trader, the driver, or the son abroad sending money home while quietly worrying about your own parents. Walk into a licensed pension trustee – Enterprise, Petra, Old Mutual, Databank, any NPRA-registered Tier 3 provider – and open a personal pension account in your own name. Start with whatever you can. Fifty cedis. A hundred. The size of the first contribution is not the point. The point is refusing to let your old age depend entirely on the goodwill and good fortune of people you cannot control.

My grandfather’s pension had names. Mine will not. And neither should yours.

God bless you.