What is happening in our country; where foreigners are treated like kings yet the citizens undertaking the real hard jobs do not benefit. This time I am talking about Tigo a subsidiary of Millicom Internation. This is what Millicom reported:

Millicom International Cellular has reported a 30% increase in revenues for the year ended 31 December 2008 to USD3.412 billion. EBITDA climbed by 31% from USD1.119 billion to USD1.486 billion, while net profit fell from USD687 million to USD517 million, principally as a result of two one-off events which incurred a net charge of USD55 million. Chief Executive Marc Beuls said the firm should be able to maintain its fourth-quarter core margin around 45% in 2009. ‘Bar any major surprises, we think that that level should be sustainable going forward for the full year 2009,’ he told Reuters.

Now take a trip to Ghana and there will be no pay increase for local staff, budgets slashed and career training scraped this year, yet all the Latino expatriate staff are having their pay increased. My question is this, why do we sit for these third rated ex pats take us for fools? Tigo staff what are you doing about this? Where is your sense of equality to these expatriate who are being paid an average of $5000 a month plus pecks such as half yearly bonuses, cars, homes and tickets to visit where ever they come from? Just lay down your tools in a strike action for a week; we’ll see if those ex pats will do all the work. Talking about expatriates how many of them are companies allowed to have at any given time? These phone companies for a fact have all exceeded their quota many times over. What are GIPC, immigration, ministries of telecommunication and trade doing about this?

We pay through the nose in call charges only for all the money made by these operators from poor services to be shipped out of Ghana. One operator operating here in Ghana; banks $3 million dollars daily (seven days a week) almost all this money gets wired out of Ghana within hours to its parent company yet they operate the Most Troublesome Network. You figure it out.

By Felicia Nkra

Email: fnkra@yahoo.com