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This column began on Monday, November 16, 2009. It wasn't expected to run for 10 good years. Over the 10-year period, one has come to know that virtually everything we, as motherland compatriots, seek in development today, we have attempted before, sometimes to a substantial level of success. What we have lacked is continuity of the positive. If we had been consistent in improving the right while discarding the wrong, we would be way beyond our current state.
Take industrialization. Nkrumah initiated rural industries. Busia promoted cottage industries. Add Blaa Kutu's Suame-based local 'Boafo automobile' manufacturing; and revival of the Nkrumah Sanyo electronic assembling factory at Tema with his 'Akasanoma pre-set' radio receiving set for all project; in the rural industries approach. All are of duka daya (same) 'one district, one factory' value. The manner of project and programme discontinuance that characterised governmental transitions was taken to obscene heights by congress people in vulgarity 2009-2016.
Just before the oil price crunch in 2007, Kufuor gave every district a million Ghana Cedis (check out one constituency one million dollars) and a jarra ntoso? of 15 kilometres of tarred road for each district. The latter was scuttled by the need to mobilise extra funds to contain the unequalled killer US$147 a barrel crude oil price. Dams were all over the place until neglect silted them to invite 'one village one dam.'
Meanwhile, Onaapo is determined to abuse the two-term presidential office limit spirit of the constitution. Apparently, he hasn't had enough of w? nky? nni (create loot and share) chop, chop governance. Ethically, the constitutional no third term means a sitting president is finished if he loses a succession election. Impliedly, his comeback effort means immorally contesting for a third term; having won the first and lost the second as incumbent. If ?sono Kokuroko had the Midas touch of turning everything into gold, the Asomdwie-Onaapo pair had the Sadim (Sidam) ruining touch.
Onaapo has enjoyed completing a term; first a president by default, second an elected, albeit fraudulently, president. Two-peat is the limit. Anything else is unconstitutional; if not in word, certainly, in spirit. We saw that before, when Blaa Kutu tried to extend his term by the aborted 'Union Government' referendum. A nebulous referendum allowed Jeremiah to steal his way in the metamorphosis of 1992, to extend his military rule by eight more years. What Onaapo is doing is what Blaa Kutu failed to do with a referendum, but Jeremiah succeeded with referendum. Unfortunately for Onaapo, the aborted 2019 planned referendum did not include another term for him to win or lose. He's indulging in the Jeremiah legacy of a congress of no limit to greed.
The lawmakers' spokesperson was peeved by a striker Ducthman's undiplomatic (some say), talk of 'Ghana beyond corruption' in September. There is no way this motherland would go anywhere of prosperity anytime soon with the practice of siphoning what would be used to develop into private pockets. There is nothing pro-development that we are doing now which we haven't done before. That means if we don't change what we are doing and how we are going about doing it, there is no hope that we will develop anytime soon.
We haven't seen much done about the wrong things people were said to have done in 2016. Bus branding, Kumasi Airport and Metro mass (in the transportation sector alone), Kwame Nkrumah and Kasoa interchnages (roads), accounting for borrowed huge sums of money, others.
In our journey to the developed land, we have gone through it all; the good, the bad and the ugly. As we head into a 2020 election, we have enough of the past to explain the present. One hopes that would be a guide to informed choice of never again allowing disruption of the good we have started. It should be aggressively dealing with the thieves, the ills of the present, and forcefully pressing ahead with the free SHS project. Factories everywhere is the way forward, not reinstating the gang that only knows how to thieve best. Despite their avid appetite for dismantling everything helpful to compatriots they met: MMT, NHIS, NYEP, what have you, they want to come back. T?feakwa o, compatriots!
Never bring onaapo and his bunch of progress disruptors and dismantlers back. All he wants is the bauxite; everything else will be dismantling, if he can secure the morally unconstitutional mandate. Our gains are too important to discontinue, abort or truncate. We are best served by continuity of free SHS and its allied poverty-reducing programmes. Any beneficial review would best be by the protagonist originator and not the antagonist against.
We just moved from a corruptible president with corruptible appointees to an incorruptible president with some corruptible appointees. Our quest must be the incorruptible president with incorruptible appointees. Certainly, never again the first; not the second, unless the second president can guarantee he will dump his corruptible appointees for incorruptible ones. Clearly, based on 2009-2016, the amp?br? undefined 'review' promise would stall and most likely halt our progressive advances in education, jobs, health-fare and general development.
I'm still searching for the reason(s) why my middle form two teacher asked me to memorise Psalm 120 and recite it for a Children's Day performance at the Methodist Church in Berekum on November 8, 1959. Maybe people who have generously been labouring reading this readability weary column would be able to tell me. The last sentence of Psalm 120 (King James Version) of the Bible reads: 'I am for peace; but when I speak, they are for war.'
I am for development; so I thought anytime I wrote, it would be for development. So please tell me, reader, is that true or false? Sayest thou what, reader? Y? de b?si ha (column is hereby suspended, meaning also I drop my pen) for the foreseeable future; even when I hear evil, see evil and speak evil.
