The ongoing nationwide strike by the Civil and Local Government Staff Association of Ghana (CLOGSAG) once again exposes a deeper structural problem in Ghana’s public sector: the widening gap between productivity and entitlement.
CLOGSAG leadership argues that the government has delayed implementing a revised salary structure and improved conditions of service. But there is a fundamental irony here that should not escape any serious observer of Ghana’s governance system.
These are not factory workers isolated from the machinery of government. These are the very administrators, technocrats, and policy implementers who operate within the public financial system every day. If anyone understands the limitations of state revenue, it should be them.
Yet here we are. A strike demanding more money without any scientific grounding in where that money will come from.
It is the equivalent of workers in a bakery demanding more bread they have not baked or commercial fishermen insisting on taking home fish that have not been caught. Production must precede consumption. Wealth must be created before it can be distributed.
Ghana’s problem is that we have reversed this order.
Our public sector culture has quietly evolved into one where entitlement is divorced from output. The conversation is almost always about what the government must pay, never about what government institutions must produce.
The hard numbers are uncomfortable but unavoidable. Ghana’s tax-to-GDP ratio hovers around 14 percent. That means the government only mobilizes about 14 pesewas in taxes for every cedi produced in the economy. Out of this limited pool must come salaries, infrastructure, education, healthcare, security, debt service, and social programs.
So when public sector unions demand higher wages, a very simple question must be asked. From which economic activity will the additional revenue come?
If the national cake is small, the solution cannot simply be louder demands for bigger slices. The solution must be baking a bigger cake.
But Ghana struggles even with that basic task. By most international productivity measures, Ghana ranks among the lowest productivity economies globally. Our output per worker remains extremely low across sectors. In many public offices, processes that should take minutes take days. Files move slowly. Decisions stall. Innovation is rare. Systems resist efficiency.
Yet salary demands rise with admirable consistency. This is not sustainable.
The uncomfortable truth is that a country cannot pay Scandinavian-style public sector wages with sub-Saharan productivity levels. Economics does not bend to slogans or strikes.
If Ghana is serious about resolving this cycle of recurring industrial actions, we must begin thinking about a more rational framework for public sector compensation. One option is to peg total public sector wages to a defined percentage of GDP.
Such a system would introduce a simple but powerful national incentive. If GDP grows, public sector wages grow. If productivity increases, incomes increase. If the economy expands, government workers benefit automatically. But if the economy stagnates, everyone understands that there is simply less bread to share.
This approach would align incentives across the entire public sector. Instead of merely negotiating for higher pay, public servants would have a clear national interest in policies and administrative practices that expand economic output.
It would transform the conversation from “pay us more” to “let us grow the economy so everyone earns more.”
Right now, Ghana suffers from a dangerous illusion that income can be negotiated into existence. It cannot.
Every cedi paid by the government must first be generated by someone somewhere in the economy who produced something of value.
Until Ghana fully embraces this basic economic truth, strikes like the current CLOGSAG action will continue to repeat themselves, with louder demands confronting an empty treasury.
A nation cannot eat what it has not baked. And until Ghana learns to bake far more than it currently does, the struggle over slices of a very small loaf will remain our permanent national pastime.
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