Hon. Senators, we heard that amidst mounting public pressure and outright resentment of your colleagues in the House of Representatives, you have annulled your plan to enact into law a lucrative pension and benefit scheme that upon retirement, you members of the Legislature, Executive and the Judiciary, including your respective families, would have lived on until death do your part.
In fact, the proposed pension and benefit scheme excluded civil servants, and their respective families, making it fundamentally selfish and discriminatory, to say the least.
So, Hon. Senators, let’s assume you were in the category of a civil servant, how would you have felt? Our best guess is, you would have felt despondent or lost your sense of belonging.
If our guess is accurate, Hon. Senators, why then did you propose such a selfish and discriminatory pension scheme? Why did you exclude civil servants? Don’t they too have families and cook pots at home? To put it the other way around, what were you thinking about? Me, myself, and I?
It is this same ‘Me, Myself and I’ mindset that continues to ruin our country; keeping it economically stagnated and a vast majority of its citizenry dirt poor, while a few elites, including you, get richer overnight.
Just imagine, had your proposed pension and benefit scheme successfully sailed through, the government would have spent a staggering US$2.8 million annually just on 30 retired senators alone.
Doesn’t this amount to complete selfishness and wickedness? Absolutely it does.
Apart from excluding civil servants from the failed pension and benefit scheme, don’t you senators have the consciences to know that this country badly needs that US$2.8 million dollars to build more roads or fix existing ones to connect hard-to-reach counties like Grand Gedeh, Sinoe, Grand Kru and Maryland, or buy more beds, medicines and equipment for JFK, Redemption and the Telewonyan Hospitals rather than put it in the pockets?
Just a few months ago, Hon. Senators, the entire citizenry was outraged upon hearing that each of you lawmakers had received thirty thousand United States Dollars (US$30,000) to be used for a so-called constituency engagement.
Why should it only be you that must always receive a large or lion share of the national cake? The answer is simple. ‘Me, Myself and I’ only, and let the rest go to hell.
This is selfish and completely wrong, Hon. Senators. For the sake of our country and people, let us do away with this ‘Me, Myself and I’ mindset to move our country forward and improve the livelihoods of its citizenry.
For God’s sake, had the citizens not elected you, you would not have sat where you are sitting today. Until you people who are now the major decision makers of our country can do away with your ‘Me, Myself and I’ mindset, our country will continue to retrogress, while other nations around us in the sub-region, progress.
