Kow Abaka Essuman, former Legal Counsel to President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, has given the Ministry of Finance until Friday, 11 September 2026, to pay his outstanding salary arrears and terminal benefits or face proceedings against the State.
His lawyers, Vint & Aletheia Attorneys & Consultants, delivered the demand in a letter dated 8 September and addressed to Finance Minister Dr Cassiel Ato Forson, which the Ministry stamped as received on 9 September.
Mr Essuman is pressing the claim after twenty months of what he describes as fruitless representations, and he wants more than the principal. The letter demands interest on the outstanding sum running from 7 January 2025, the day his tenure ended, calculated at the prevailing commercial bank rate.
What the appointment promised
The letter sets out a documentary trail. Former President Akufo-Addo appointed Mr Essuman as Legal Counsel to the President by a letter dated 15 June 2021, reference SCR/PF/E/192/21, covering the period from 8 January 2021 to 7 January 2025.
A second letter dated 11 October 2024, reference SCR/DA39/314/01, made him Acting Secretary to the President with effect from 3 October 2024, a role he held alongside his existing duties.
His terms of appointment, according to the letter, provided for three components at the end of his tenure. He was to receive four months’ consolidated salary for every completed year of service or part thereof, an installation grant equivalent to one month’s salary, and a resettlement grant equivalent to one month’s salary for each year or fraction of a year served.
Notably, the letter never states what those components add up to. It demands the full amount without quantifying it, leaving the arithmetic to the Ministry and the public to guess at.
The legal ground the claim stands on
Vint & Aletheia anchor the demand in Section 2(c)(ii) of the Presidential (Transition) Act, 2012 (Act 845), which obliges the Transition Team to ensure that salaries, allowances, facilities, privileges and retiring benefits determined by Parliament for Article 71 officeholders reach those persons without undue delay.
That team finished its work long ago, the lawyers argue, and more than twenty months have passed since Parliament fixed the relevant emoluments. Their client, whom they describe as a holder of an office specified in Article 71, remains unpaid.
The comparison they draw is pointed. The letter states that the Speaker and Members of Parliament, and here it inserts the phrase “including yourself” directly at Forson, along with former ministers, deputy ministers, MMDCEs and the Chairman and members of the Council of State, have all collected their arrears and terminal benefits for the same period.
Former Presidential Staffers, they say, have not. On that footing, the lawyers characterise the continued withholding as “arbitrary, discriminatory, unfair and unlawful.”
A grievance aired long before the lawyers
Mr Essuman has been making this argument in public for months. In July, he accused Forson of reading four budgets, including two mid-year reviews, without settling what fell due to Presidency staff in January 2025 while paying current Presidency staff, calling the situation utterly unreasonable.
Announcing the demand letter this week, he framed the escalation in blunt terms, saying twenty months of waiting had run its course and that he expected the Finance Minister to pay by Friday and avoid a judgment debt with interest.
That warning carries weight in a country where judgment debts have repeatedly drained the public purse and generated their own political scandals. Essuman is effectively telling the Ministry that settling now costs less than losing later.
The letter reaches beyond the Finance Ministry. Copies went to the Chief of Staff, the Secretary to the President and the Legal Counsel to the President at Jubilee House, and to the Attorney-General at Law House. Erasmus Papa Akotey Quartey signed on behalf of the firm.
Circulating the demand to the Attorney-General signals that Mr Essuman’s team expects the State’s principal legal adviser to be involved either in authorising payment or in defending the suit. Copying the current occupants of the offices he once held adds a quieter pressure, since those officials will face the same question at the end of this administration.
What happens after Friday
The letter leaves no room for further correspondence. If payment does not arrive by the deadline, the lawyers say they have firm instructions to commence proceedings against the State for the principal, interest and costs, without returning to the Ministry.
Neither Forson nor the Ministry of Finance has responded publicly since receiving the letter. Their silence for now leaves the substantive question untested, namely whether presidential staffers fall within the Article 71 category Essuman claims for himself, and whether the State accepts that the entitlements crystallised on the day his tenure ended.
Should the matter reach court, those are the questions a judge will have to settle, and the answer will bind far more former appointees than the one who brought the claim.
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