Being Unemployed Is Nothing to Joke About

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

January 12, 2017

E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

He has been a Member of Parliament for some 12 long years, and so one can safely assume that Mr. Nii Amasah Namoale, who recently lost his La Dade-Kotopon seat, has had the rare privilege of enjoying three ex-gratia awards, so-called, running to the tune of several hundred-thousand cedis (See “I’m Now an Unemployed Graduate – Former MP for La Dade-Kotopon” Ghanaweb.com 1/11/17). During this dozen-year period, Nii Namoale also had the privilege of serving in several deputy cabinet portfolios. So strictly or realistically speaking, this is not a man who can be said to have experienced what it really means to be unemployed, as yours truly did for some two of the longest years of his life during the 1990s.

Which is why he is able to make light of the harrowing situation that confronts nearly half of all Ghanaian college graduates in the country. My beef here is that people like Nii Namoale, who have been in government since the Biblical Methuselah discovered the hallowed use of his vital organs have absolutely no reason to gripe about unemployment, for as that ageless adage goes, “As you make your bed, so shall you lie on it.” In sum, people like Mr. Namoale ought to be held accountable for the abjectly dismal condition of the job market in the country. Indeed, had they, literally, rolled up their sleeves and dirtied their chubby hands with their scandalously profligate boss, the former President John Dramani Mahama, to responsibly manage the nation’s economy, instead of blindly and recklessly playing Father Christmas, or Santa Claus, with the Ghanaian taxpayer’s money, we would not be saddled with the level of break-neck socioeconomic mess in which we all presently find ourselves.

What piqued my attention and interest when I first came across this rather terse news report of an interview that the former NDC-MP granted Okay-Fm’s Mr. Gilbert Abeiku Aggrey Santana, had to do with that one memorable occasion when Mr. Namoale, pathologically imbued with the hubris of his ministerial heft, had the temerity to email an insolent message to yours truly to the effect that his then-12-year-old son was far more intelligent that I. Yes, such was the Vesuvian level of arrogance that characterized the bulk of the key operatives of the Mills-Mahama government of the National Democratic Congress, and later the Mahama/Amissah-Arthur regime.

Since then, I have had occasion to exchange a benign nicety with the man, once when I was featured via phone on Kasapa-Fm radio. Nii Namoale happened to be in the studio and extended a greeting to me through the host of the program, though I could clearly hear him genially extend the same. I have never let on this one to any close relatives, including my deceased parents, but I came to the brink of committing suicide by jumping down the porch/balcony of our fourth-floor apartment at the foot of the George Washington some 20 years ago, when I lost my teaching job at the Technical Careers Institutes, where my late father also taught, and felt as totally hopeless and insignificant as I had never felt in my life before. Today, TCI has a $1,000 essay competition award established in the name of my father who was never really liked by quite a few of the topmost administrators of that two-year vocational school.

That he narrowly lost his La Dade-Kotopon seat to his main challenger, Mr. Vincent Sowah Odotei, the former CEO of the Accra Hearts of Oak football club, means that by the lights of quite a remarkable percentage of the voters of the La Dade-Kotopon Constituency, Nii Namoale had performed creditably while he still had their confidence, trust and mandate. But like all things and institutions human, Nii Namoale had to be respectfully eased out of the seat in which he no doubt had become increasingly comfortable like his own skin with time. But here again, like all else, destiny has been said to be a wheel-of-fortune that turns up-and-down like a see-saw game set. He may yet have his political star rise and shine yet again in the offing.

In the meantime, it may be worth his while for the former Deputy Minister of Fisheries, if memory serves me accurately, to take stock of his fortunes, and misfortunes, and strategize on a possible comeback in the near future. Hopefully, he would have by then learned the invaluable productive skill of job creation, not just for himself, but for the teeming pool of young and gloriously talented college graduates who are having a difficult time securing the sort of gainful jobs for which they had been educated as well. And so instead of joking about flying out to strife-torn South Sudan in search of a nonexistent job, Nii Namoale would be better off using this seasonal interregnum to take a certificate course at the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration (GIMPA), if he does not already have one.

Believe me, Nii, the people of South Sudan have more than their fair share of socioeconomic problems to be further saddled with the self-created predicaments of Ghanaian carpetbaggers like you. I hope these words of encouragement and tough-love bring the former La Dade-Kotopon MP some consolation and good cheer. And as we say here in my corner of the globe, “Welcome back to the hardscrabble existence of opposition politics, Paa Nii.” Mihabo Dumsor. I wish you Dumsor, my brother. Yaa Mahama!

*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs