“Better Ghana” Agenda is officially dead

In a GNA report in Accra on April 30 President John Evans Atta Mills said government would in no way misplace the trust Ghanaians had reposed in it and pointed out that the “Better Ghana” Agenda would not be a nine-day wonder. Government, he said, would ensure every action taken was geared towards delivering on its promises to improve on the living standards of Ghanaians. "We need to put away petty and insignificant differences for national cohesion to move the nation forward," he added. What is prompting the President to make such a statement 18 months into his administration? Why is he using words like “a nine-day wonder” and “petty and insignificant difference?” Is he dreaming of his promises as nine day wonder? And by the way where is the “Better Ghana”? This paper is intended to wake the President up from his dream to realise that is “Better Ghana” agenda is still born. Dead! Bogus and fraudulent at birth! Never existed! A figment of his own imagination!

For me, looking for the evidence of “Better Ghana” is like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. Let us forget about the NDC manifesto because they abandoned it on the 7th of January 2009. Let us forgive them the 100 days’ fiasco because the President hit the ground crawling and it was the most tedious 100 days in our democratic history. Let us fast forward to the beginning on this year when during his valedictory speech to Parliament which he calls the “state of the nation” address, he made a reaffirmation of his ““Better Ghana”” agenda for the year 2010, but six months down the line, we are yet to realise a single one of his promises. From his promise to a “a commitment to do away with the style of politics that mistook democratic transfer of power as an opportunity to wreak vengeance”, through a pledge to “fast-track the development of a road transport network that will meet the economic, social and environmental needs of Ghana in the years ahead”, to the use of our youth as the “potent educational tool to drive the programme of nation building”, the President is yet to realise any of his promises to us. Oh, lest I forget-he said he was going to ask his ministers to come out with a blue print by June this year to create jobs. None of these has been realised and instead we have a litany of failures littered all over the country. The Black stars gave us something to cheer about and at least a potion to drown our sorrows in. Now that Suarez has cheated us out of the World Cup, we have suddenly woken up to a memory of our failed political promises. So what is left of the “Better Ghana” agenda? With the promise to grow the economy now on the reverse, and the 1.6 million jobs turning out to be phantom ones, and not a single blade of sorghum to show for the agricultural revolution, the NDC has now resorted to abusive name calling led by Koku Anyidoho, Hannah Bisiw, Kobby Acheampong and Okudzeto Ablakwa with such” superficial childish effusions being blown on the airwaves” as someone once remarked

They have now resorted to information that is spread for the purpose of promoting Anti NPP cause. They use their gutter press to spread spurious rumours about the past administration with the aim of destroying everything it stood for without offering any alternatives.

They have since being in office been tinkering with the existing NPP policies with the intention sometimes of demonising it to make it impossible to continue or attempting to stamp it with” MADE BY NDC”. The policies in question are the NHIS, NYEP, LEAP, MMT, NDF and many more.

The NHIS which was boycotted by the NDC during its formative years but which nevertheless has saved the lives of some 11 million Ghanaians has been subjected to a barrage of negative campaign by the government and as a result the government is now going to “submit a revised National Health Insurance Bill to Cabinet for consideration. The attempt at name changing from NHIS to UHIS has been found to be a time waster, and the one-time premium payment has been a real as a mirage. Instead we have the chief executive using our hard earned currencies in a wild property owning/grabbing agenda. The Ghana Medical Council up in arms against the government on how they are killing the NHIS slowly. The NYEP which the NDC said did not exist and they said they would create their own Youth Employment Service (YES) has now become the absorbent of their youth policy. The NYEP created a “1.6 million phantom jobs” even before the NDC admitted it existed and already had 110,000 existing jobs before 7th January 2009. The reason why I know this is because the NDC started sacking them to replace them with their party favourites – so much for a President with a “a commitment to do away with the style of politics that mistook democratic transfer of power as an opportunity to wreak vengeance”.

The NDC denied that there a policy by the NPP called LEAP (Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty). In a republic day “ground breaking announcement by the government at Tamale, the government is to expand the coverage of the Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) programme to enable more people including senior citizens to benefit from the unconditional grant of GH¢8.0 to 15 per month. So much for new policy!

The Metro Mass Transport programme has been run down with the fleet of buses all over the country run down and cannibalised with the aim of making it impossible to continue. How can the NDC allow buses christened “Kufuor buses” be so visible on the landscape of Ghana. “Better Ghana” means you have to kill or destroy every Kufuor legacy. The MMT was the most visible of all as it permeated every nook and cranny of the Ghanaian society.

The Northern Development Fund began with humble 25 million Ghana cedi seed money and the NPP manifesto promised to top it up to $1billion from 2009. The NDC ridiculed the initial seed money and in a typical copy cat attitude hurriedly put a SADA programme in the latter editions of their manifesto. In the words of President Mills, it has become a nine day wonder as SADA has suddenly disappeared from the NDC 2010 budget.

Left with no policy to create their “Better Ghana” mirage the NDC have resorted to politics of hatred, polarization with insipid tribal undertones. With midnight police swoops in Dagbon, arrests on tarmacs and extra judicial arrests and refusal by the police to investigate government supported crimes; the NDC is going down the root of its predecessor PNDC. No wonder their own founder says they have nothing to tell Ghanaians in 2012. , President Mills unashamedly describes this kind of government as “example of African Democracy [with an atmosphere of unfettered free speech] of which all Ghanaians can be proud”. In its first and boldest attempt as policy making, the NDC has unmasked its true colours. The case of Mabey and Johnson has not gone to bed yet and it is emerging that the biggest bribery case since Scancem is rearing its ugly head in STX Korea. Whichever way you look at the two agreements that the government has already signed and committed the nation to – the Memorandum of Understanding and the Off-taker Agreement, it is a case of the government selling Ghana cheap and for the Koreans it is get the money and run. The agreements will go down in history as the one that sold Ghana’s oil reserves for police flats. This is a historical first and President Mills will go down with a millstone around his neck as the man who gave away our children’s future (our oil) for nothing and in return we got sold 200,000 “affordable houses” at $50,000 per unit. Affordable indeed! Is this the “Better Ghana” we have been waiting for or shall we look for another? How can you sign away your life savings of $10 billion to a company that is $6.6 billion in debt/ it is crazy. The Koreans are not here to build anyway (and we have better builders in GREDA). They are here, according to the Memorandum of Understanding signed by Alban Bagbin on 4th March 2010, to take over the “Ghana National Petroleum Company’s business relations in oil and gas industry”

The “Better Ghana” agenda was pronounced clinically dead on 9th December 2009 when Hon Albert Abongo put pen to paper on the Off-taker agreement for the government of Ghana to guarantee the loan that the Koreans are going to raise from Woori Bank and i do not know if he read the clause in the agreement that stated that “in relation to this off-taker Agreement and the government guarantee (for the loan), the Government of Ghana (GOG) shall irrevocably waive its sovereign immunity” This effectively means we cannot undertake any credibility checks on them. Is this the way for a sovereign nation to sign an agreement with a private company? The Memorandum of Understanding also asks government to secure the deal in Parliament under “certificate of urgency”. Why this urgency and why is the whole deal shrouded in secrecy with ministers and the Vice President running a circuitous route of Seoul and Abu Dhabi to sign agreements and not in Ghana? Things cannot be right in all this at all. Finally, I venture to think that the public interest may be measured by the degree of public concern and public benefit. I believe that we the people of Ghana are legitimately concerned about this deal and particularly about the extent to which our fundamental rights to our property is being chipped away by President Mills and his cohorts, including the wanton abuse and destruction of state resources. The manner in which the Divestiture Implementation Committee went on about its actions in the 1980s and 1990s in selling our businesses away is being replicated by the government here again. They are selling our souls away to foreigners again. It is an act so reprehensible that the public of Ghana have to have a concern to know about it and ask Professor Mills to stop this deal and apologise to all of us for the fast one they wanted to pull on us. He assisted Rawlings to chip away our national enterprise skills in the 1990s and made us lose a self belief in ourselves in our industrialization process. To give away our own right to build our nation to our own levels of pride is an affront to his own “Better Ghana” agenda. Now the “Better Ghana” agenda is OFFICIALLY DEAD!

Kwesi Atta-Krufi Hayford.