In response to GhanaWeb’s report, “Stakeholders call for a national platform to harness retirees’ expertise,” Yaw Nsarko reflects on Ghana’s approach to retirement, the value of older professionals and the need for greater intergenerational mentorship.
I have supported this kind of thing for the better part of my adult life.
As I watched, and saw, that our manpower planning had no real idea what to do with our parents’ generation when they were sixty. That itself is a death sentence, an absolute waste of tremendously experienced, well-trained, and expensive professionals.
This is a shocking failure of imagination. Sixty, in 2026, is such an arbitrary cut-off.
The Chinese told me that a person cannot really have mastered a field comprehensively before sixty. At sixty, blessed with decent health, people are more than productive, in the 21st century reality.
Those who are sixty-plus may share. But only now, a few years from sixty, do I really feel a sense of the kind of confidence they spoke about.
So, in many places, they have older people in China systematically mentoring younger people. Both sides, the young and the old, benefit tremendously from this intergenerational interaction.
I have seen programmes to attract the very best among professionals from the West (including Nobel prize winners) to China to mentor younger Chinese at world-class standards.
We really do not know what we are doing in this regard.
At a hundred years of age, Mahathir Mohamad gave simple advice: “you may go on pension, but never retire, or else your brain dies.”
But to create this space for mentoring, you must figure how to get real growth for your economy. We have no serious ideas to achieve that, so this arbitrary pruning at sixty becomes the way to manage an unmanageable situation.
A society that has no systematic plan for the old, communicates to the young that it has no plans for their future. Because if the young endure, it is certain that they will get old.
