Nana Akufo-Addo’s Cacophony Of Promises

?The winner’s edge is not in a gifted birth, a high IQ, or in talent. The winner’s edge is all in the attitude, not aptitude. Attitude is the criterion for success.-Denis Waitley

Nana Akufo-Addo, the flagbearer of the New Patriotic Party for election 2012, always has a unique style of making news, which is usually altruistic and for reasons that would not advance his quest to lead this country.

I have always wondered, time without number, whether he has advisors, and if they are consulted before he makes public pronouncement.

The 67-years-old Nana Addo, who looks like someone on whom old age has suddenly crept up, is now withdrawn and shut-in, paralyzed with fear, repressing what he sees out of the window and is entrenched in his myopic views.

His initiatives reflect a steadfast embrace of every status quo, casting aspersions at every change, complaining to the world and frightening his own citizens over the dangers lurking in the jungle and the ostensibly unavoidable “next war,” come December 2012, when he losses.

First, it was the ‘All-Die-Be-Die” comment he made, ostensibly inciting party supporters of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) to rise up, and fight and die for him to become President, irrespective of 2012 verdict.

Why? Because it has been decreed by the founders of this nation that, come what may, he must be president of this nation, regardless of what happens and how much blood must be shed, just for him to lead this country.

This is the same man who held a press conference to impress upon President Mills to send troops to go and oust the beleaguered and self-imposed Ivorian leader Laurent Gbagbo, who like Nana Addo, had also become consumed with power, that he wanted to flout the will of the people and still hang on even when it was clear he had lost the elections.

The security services in this country sometimes amaze me; they didn’t deem it necessary to invite Nana Addo to come and answer for what happened ‘in Atiwa, when in that ‘All-Die-Be-Die famous speech, he admitted that, in the Atiwa by-elections, “we (NPP) showed something small there’.

This is a clear admission that he knew before hand what happened to those innocent Ghanaians who got injured as a result of the careless and self-centered leaders like him.

The security services had time to invite Herbert Mensah to come and substantiate his wild allegations about his claim that, he had listened to a tape in the company of the former President Jerry John Rawlings, on which it was alleged that GH¢90million is going to be used by the President to campaign for the flagbearership slot of the National Democratic Congress.

How does this compromise the security of this nation? What should have attracted the attention of the Security Services is Nana Addo’s incitement of young Ghanaians to pick up arms and fight when he loses the next elections (2012).

He made a mockery of himself when he read a tribute at the funeral of his supposed good friend and member of the NPP, Theresa Amerley Tagoe; he made a politically incorrect and an inept statement by referring to the buttocks of a deceased person.

Nana Akufo-Addo delivered a speech recently, titled “The NPP Story and Our Vision for 2012” at a seminar for parliamentary candidates, spokespersons and national executives for elections 2012’.

The central theme of the message is that, the NPP wants to come to office with programmes but not with promises. This is good, indeed, because elections are not a popularity contest but a contest of ideas and a promise of a better future.

Regrettably, in that speech, all that Akufo-Addo did was to catalogue promises and not programmes. Since Nana Addo won the flagbearership contest last year to lead his party, all he has done so far, as one newspaper rightly captured, was to lead the party to the graveyard.

Ghanaians are yet to see one blueprint or actionable development agenda from Nana Addo.

At a meeting where the opportunity presented itself for him to apprise the parliamentary candidates, spokespersons and national executives of his vision for them to go out and sell to Ghanaians, he went playing semantics, contradicting himself by talking of programmes and not promises, when there is nowhere in the speech where any programme was outline.

Any programme of action must be ‘Specific’, ‘Measurable’, ‘Attainable’, Results-oriented’ and Time-bound’ (SMART). Based on these parameters, I would like to subject Nana Addo’s speech to critical analysis, and then we can see, if anybody can go out and sell this long, boring, uninspiring speech to Ghanaians.

The next elections should be fought on the strength of policies and not personality of who has been in the forefront of Ghanaian politics more than thirty years, which Nana Addo keeps on reminding us of.

Nana Addo said: “What we need is a political economy that serves our people, by building a strong bridge from the times when big government did everything, to a future when people are entrusted with self-governance”

He continued: “We need to follow the wisdom of our forefathers: Danquah believed that the Ghanaian was capable of managing what the socialists called at the time, ‘the commanding heights’ of the economy. We must be bold and intelligent in making this happen. To do so, we should not be shy of introducing policies that look, first and foremost, after our own people at every level of our economy”

A classical Nana Addo talking? Where is the programme? He is always in a hurry to mention J.B Danquah, a stooge of the west, who never ruled this country, and worst, Ghanaians don’t have any meaningful benchmark to measure his contribution to the socio-economic development of this country, except his writings and his speeches which Nana Addo has chewed and regurgitates at the least chance, before a gathering of his followers. NPP is a tradition of talkers, which is why there are only good in opposition.

“After more than thirty years in frontline politics, the more I travel around the country canvassing for votes, the more I see the urgency in waging and winning the war against poverty. So far, we have not been able to win the war against poverty because we have been using the same ineffective weapons of old.

The only way forward is to be deliberate and determined in the pre-independence dream of transforming Ghana from a Guggisberg economy to a modern economy of added value. We must free ourselves from the economic arrangements designed by our former colonial masters to serve their particular purpose at the time” he said.

Talk is cheap, Nana. NPP under former President Kufuor had eight years to transform the fortunes of this country; in the history of this country, no government had the amount of money and goodwill they had both from within Ghana, Africa and from our donor partners.

Traders reduced their prices so that the government could succeed. We had a clean bill of foreign debt through the Highly-Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative of the World Bank, yet what did the government of which you were a cabinet minister do with all that money?

You shared the money among yourselves, and the immoral ones among you, used it for “Bonking”.

You used yours for a flamboyant campaign that never was witnessed in this country. What credibility have you got left that is convincing enough for us to want to put the destiny of this country in your hands?

The whole speech which I have no time and space to digest is a contradiction of what Nana Addo is preaching. “Those of us in this room hold the key to our nation’s future; if we are smart and win the 2012 elections.

Let us work hard in unity to ensure that that future is one of peace, progress and prosperity. Then history will be kind to us”.

We cannot mortgage our destiny and prosperity for empty cacophonies; we need thinkers, and not people who are so full of themselves, and energized by their anxieties to rule this country at all cost.

Like a Nigerian proverb, Money says, don’t make plans for me when am not home. Nana Addo’s latest best interpretor of own comments, learn 2 be altruistic