Comrade Murtala, the supply of spouses is an old NDC manifesto plank

Being known to have a scandalously short memory capacity, the Deputy Minister of Trade and Industry may have so soon forgotten this quite well-known fact, that it was, indeed, Ms. Akua Sena Dansua, then Minister of Women and Children’s Affairs, who vehemently argued in favor of maintaining the present 3-year Senior High School (SHS) system because, in the primitive imagination of Ms. Dansua, it would enable our young women to get out of school on time and be able to grab for themselves the ideal husbands of their dreams.

This unarguably preposterous policy stance appears to have caught on with the rest of the leadership of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) because today, as a show of its gratitude, Ms. Dansua is Ghana’s Ambassador to Germany. This inexcusably savage policy proposal, as I explained in one of my columns in 2009, or thereabouts, was directly and/or squarely based on the fact that Ms. Dansua’s own daughter, by a previous marriage, had dropped out of the City College of New York (CCNY) of the City University of New York (CUNY) to marry an Accra boy who owned a sex-toy shop in the Times Square vicinity of the Big Apple.

And so when he sarcastically says that very soon Nana Akufo-Addo would be promising Ghanaian voters husbands and wives, in order to get them to vote him into residency at the Flagstaff House, the rump-Convention People’s Party (r-CPP) crossover candidate is merely echoing an old education-policy plank of the erstwhile Atta-Mills-led regime of the National Democratic Congress. Under President John Dramani Mahama, the NDC continues to doggedly pursue a 3-year SHS system which has delivered and continues to deliver the worst academic results in nearly 60 years of Ghana’s postcolonial history.

Mr. Ibrahim Murtala Mohammed’s salvo was reportedly directed at Nana Akufo-Addo’s recent electioneering campaign promise that he intended to establish one factory in each and every one of the 216 districts in the country. I have already addressed this policy proposal in another column, and therefore find it unnecessary to belabor the same herein. Except, of course, to heartily concur with Mr. Franklin Cudjoe, the Executive Director of the IMANI education and policy think-tank, that any viable attempt to rapidly and opportunely develop the country would perforce have to begin with a comprehensive policy initiative aimed at effectively ending the perennial bane of Dumsor, or erratic energy supply throughout the country.

Indeed, if he wanted his criticism of rampantly vacuous electioneering campaign promises to be taken seriously, the Deputy Trade and Industry Minister would have done far better to direct his barb at his own boss and patron, President John Dramani Mahama, who is more notorious than any other Ghanaian leader for making the most vacuous of electioneering campaign promises. Not very long ago, for instance, Mr. Cudjoe pointed out the fact that as of July 2015, President Mahama had only been able to construct only one of the two-hundred Senior High Schools that he had promised the Ghanaian electorate as the centerpiece of his mission to radically transforming the quality of the nation’s public educational system.

The one district one factory policy proposal by the presidential candidate of the main opposition New Patriotic Party may not sound practicable in the opinion of Akufo-Addo detractors like Mr. Mohammed, but what cannot be gainsaid is the fact that Nana Akufo-Addo has far more credibility on our national political landscape than President Mahama who, caught with his pants down in the $100,000 Ford Expedition payola scam, would shamelessly and sheepishly claim that his choice of automobile is the Japanese-made Toyota.

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