A call on Mills to shape up

The constant call on President Mills by his own party functionaries demanding for a faster pace of delivery in meeting the needs of Ghanaians seems to go on unabated. The Majority Leader in Parliament, Alban Bagbin recently voiced a lost of confidence in the 9 months Atta Mills government and called for an immediate and far-reaching reshuffle. According to the majority leader the Mills-led government is not performing and has called on the President to shape up. Bagbin told Citi FM, an Accra-based radio station that he believes there are weak links in the Mills-led government which need tightening.

The President’s master, Jerry Rawlings and the Majority leader have publicly denounced him as an incompetent President who does not have the leadership qualities required to successfully steer the affairs of the nation. Rawlings disclosed that he, along with the entire NDC fraternity across the length and breath of the country, were being embarrassed about the government’s lackadaisical performance, insisting the man he sponsored to come to power was not meeting the aspirations of the electorate. As if that was not enough, a leading member of the NDC, Mr.Ekwow Spio Garbrah has also turned around accusing the Mills government of frittering away the government's goodwill by woefully failing to meet the expectations of Ghanaians. For three consecutive times, they presented him to Ghanaians as the savior sent by God to liberate Ghanaians from the “untold hardship” they supposedly went through during Mr. Kufuor`s regime.

After deceiving Ghanaians into voting for their candidate, these hypocrites are now all over the place telling us the learned professor is, after all, incompetent and he and his do little government do not have what it takes to rule the country. Is the NDC now playing with our intelligence by telling us that they put the wrong man forward to mess up with our lives? Did Spio Garbrah, Bagbin and Rawlings not know Mills' strengths and weaknesses before they made him their presidential candidate? The President’s lukewarm approach in providing solutions to the country’s numerous problems and the general feeling of disappointment by many Ghanaians in this NDC-government should be of concern to all well-meaning Ghanaians. NDC must not complain now because they told us the professor has the magic wand to turn our country into the paradise we so much wish for ourselves.

Interacting with the press corps at the seat of government, Osu, on his 65th birthday, President Mills said his government would not engage in any form of blame game with its opponents but will concentrate all its efforts at fixing the economy. On the contrary, the President has consistently blamed the NPP for all economic and social woes the country is facing and has done little or nothing to fix them. He also said although the economy that he inherited on his assumption of political power was severely challenged, his government has laid down several interventions to salvage it from a further slide. What should upset all well-meaning Ghanaians about the President’s interaction with the media was that he did not identify even a single one of those “several interventions”. As a country, we need to take a deep hard look at what we are doing wrong and get our acts together before the situation gets out of hand.

In present day Ghana, very few people would want to associate themselves with this bunch of losers. Ask anybody on the streets of Ghana why they voted for the NDC and the common answer you get is “I did not vote for them”. It’s really a marriage that has gone sour. Not strange, for no one would like to be part of a government that has managed to inflict so much hardship on its citizens just within a period of nine months. Petrol has now become a scarce commodity in the country, thanks to Mills and his clueless government. We are tired of their flimsy TOR-debt excuse. Kufuor faced similar problem but he did what a good leader does; he went to work and got the problem fixed!

The country’s trade deficit has gone up from 7.9 billion in 2008 to 8.1 billion. Despite a 17 percent increase in cocoa exports (a credit to the NPP government), our deficit is going up while no oil has been imported by this government since its inception to power. The financial position is unsustainable. Reports from the World Bank’s 2010 doing business index sadly showed Ghana slipping backwards from almost all the indexes. The meaning of this is that we have become a less attractive destination to investors. We've fallen to the present level because the investors know what's going on. We shouldn't expect any foreign investors when members of the NPP are unlawfully and unduly persecuted; when the rights and freedoms of citizens are being trampled upon; when members of ruling NDC could go on rampage and brutalize and kill people they see as enemies.

This World Bank report clearly does not depict the picture the Finance Minister wanted to paint when he boldly lied to Ghanaians that the country’s economy was back on track. It is unconscionable in these critical economic times to have a President who goes around the country playing the blame game. Perhaps we need to remind President Mills to start acting as a leader. Good leaders do not complain too much, neither do they beg for more time, when, indeed, there is no time. Able and capable leaders hold the bull by the horns and do what needs to be done, period.

Desmond Frimpong, NPP Norway