New Approach to Curbing Age Cheating in Civil-Service and Other Professions, Ghana



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Submitted Mar 17, 2022
Published Apr 27, 2022
10.24018/ejpolitics.2022.1.1.8

Abstract viewed = 453 times

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Age cheating or age falsification is a widespread phenomenon in many nations and professions, and even in social arrangements such as marriages and partnerships. It is not unique to Ghana or Africa, though the motivations for it may differ from country to country or profession. In Ghana, age cheating phenomenon has been experienced in football, civil service recruitment, job retention and the unilateral postponement of retirement, high level corporate management jobs, sports competitions and qualification for foreign scholarships for post-graduate degrees, and enlistment into the security forces, where a lower age is a pre-condition for eligibility, consideration, acceptance, retention and promotion.

The Social Restitutive Theory, SRT, is proposed as an approach to claw back the resulting benefits to the age cheater or age falsificators, upon the discovery of the fraud of age cheating in order to put society where it would have been without the fraudulent act. SRT lays down the approach at finding solutions to age cheating phenomenon; attempts to explain why it happens, and how society could recover any calculable losses that may have occurred, due to the fraud of cheating in age for personal gain in any social situation, where normative social structures may have been abused by the cheater with intentionality and the obfuscation of personal identifiable information.

The initiation of restitutive measures for the recovery of salary and other emoluments paid to the actor in age cheating is valid, irrespective of the benefits that may have accrued to society from the individual’s enterprise, contribution, or personal circumstance. This paper may contribute to a higher level of accountability, transparency and ethics in the professions, where age cheating is rife as well as encourage further research into the phenomenon.

Keywords: Abuse of normative social structures, Age cheating, Civil service, Data obfuscation, Enlistment into security agencies sports, Social restitutive theory.

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