An elderly man who has spent nearly five decades working as a loading boy at the Wa Metro Mass Transit station has offered a quietly devastating explanation for why he continues to do physically demanding labour at an age when most people have long since retired.…....
When asked why he was still working at his advanced age and how long he had been at it, the man’s response stripped the question of all sentimentality.
“When you’re poor, age isn’t an excuse not to work. That’s why I can’t stay home. I’ve been working as a loading boy since 1976,” he said.
His words, simple and delivered without self-pity, have resonated deeply across social media in Ghana, where his account has become a focal point for conversations about poverty, old age and the absence of a functional social protection net for the country’s most vulnerable citizens.
A loading boy, despite the name, is typically a grown man who assists passengers with their luggage, helps fill buses and earns a small daily wage from tips and informal arrangements at transport stations. It is physically taxing work under the Ghanaian sun, demanding strength, endurance and the kind of resilience that does not diminish with age when survival depends on it.
The man’s story spans more than half a century of daily labour at the same station. Since 1976, Ghana has seen multiple governments, democratic transitions, economic booms and crises, and the man has witnessed all of it from the same patch of ground, loading and unloading the possessions of strangers to survive.
His situation reflects a broader structural failure that advocacy organisations across Ghana have raised with increasing urgency: the lack of a comprehensive pension and social security system that reaches informal and unskilled workers. Formal sector employees contribute to the SSNIT pension scheme, but the vast majority of Ghana’s working population operates in the informal economy, accruing no savings, no pension entitlements and no safety net for old age.
For the man at Wa Metro Mass, retirement is not a life stage available to him. It is a luxury reserved for those who could afford to plan for it. He works because the alternative is not rest. It is hunger.
