The Volta Region has since its electoral annexation as part of Ghana, in 1956, been perceived by both residents and non-residents alike as an alien territory. Therefore, it does not come as any surprise that the youth wing of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) would massively laud Mrs. Dzifa Attivor for offensively claiming that NDC cabinet appointees of Ewe descent stand a greater risk of being prosecuted and imprisoned in the likely event of the main opposition New Patriotic Party’s being voted into power (See “Massive Support for Dzifa Attivor over ‘Tribal’ Comments” Hotfmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 4/28/16)
She may obviously not have carefully thought about her inescapably self-incriminating statement; but what the former Transportation Minister clearly implied is that nearly each and every one of the Mahama cabinet appointees is guilty of stealing the Ghanaian taxpayer’s money, except that the key operatives of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) have an ethnocentric predilection for targeting and incarcerating NDC cabinet appointees of Ewe descent. Mrs. Attivor’s statement also gives the lie to President John Dramani Mahama’s pontifical public statement that his government has been more hell-bent on fighting official corruption than any other government before it since 1957.
What also needs highlighting is the fact that the likes of Mr. Yaw Osafo-Maafo, the former Sports and Finance Minister in the Kufuor administration, have been vindicated by Mrs. Attivor for alleging that the NDC government is inordinately packed with ethnic minorities, at the expense of the Akan majority populace of the country. For Mr. Osafo-Maafo, however, the question of balance in the distribution of cabinet appointments was much less of an issue to fret over than the factual reality of the gross administrative incompetence on the part of these cabinet appointees, whose sole qualification for their respective portfolios appears to have been squarely predicated on their ethnicity rather than their demonstrable competence.
Mrs. Attivor, no doubt, epitomizes this dismal profile of the average cabinet member of the Mahama government including, of course, President John Dramani Mahama himself! It is also an open secret that Ghanaians of Ewe descent have been invariably overrepresented in the cabinet of many a National Democratic Congress’ government. Thus, it was only logical to expect that former Ewe NDC cabinet appointees would also take up a considerable percentage of the judicial mattock, or adze, when the Kufuor government, having assumed the democratic reins of governance, decided to call the key operatives of the previous government to account.
Among the Akan, there is a maxim which states that “Those who share the goodies must also be prepared to absorb the debts, or liabilities, that accrue from such extravagant standards of living.” It offensively appears that Mrs. Attivor and her fellow Ewe cabinet appointees would rather have it both ways, as it were; which is why the fired Transportation Minister would also have her constituents and those of Mr. Fiifi Kwetey, the former Deputy Finance Minister, vote blindly and massively to retain them both in parliament, as well as for President Mahama, their chief patron, to retain his residency at the Flagstaff House. Unfortunately for Mrs. Attivor, on the latter score, too, the Akan have a maxim that runs as follows: “Even longevity has its own temporal bounds or limits.”
There is also another Akan maxim which observes as follows: “Good times cannot be permanently enjoyed.” Mrs. Attivor’s tribesmen and women ought to begin to take stock of their lives and draw a balanced assessment between the cozy lifestyles of representatives like the plaintive and the extent to which the quality of their lives has been markedly enhanced, or otherwise, by the people they handsomely pay to represent their interests and aspirations in our august National Assembly. Merely being of the same ethnicity ought not to become any constructive method for keeping greedy and self-serving politicians in their pay and confidence. The fact of the matter is that you cannot eat/consume one’s ethnicity; what you can consume, both in the short- and the long-term, are infrastructural facilities and decent job-creating policy initiatives.
On the question of whether Mr. Fiifi Kwetey’s Ketu-South Constituency can deliver the 120,000 (one-hundred-and-twenty-thousand) votes that the Agriculture Minister has been touting remains to be seen. Well, as I pointed out in a previous column, the 1992 Ghanaian Constitution clearly stipulates that absolutely no constituency can return more than 50,000 votes to the Electoral Commission’s headquarters in Accra. It is quite certain that politicians like Mrs. Attivor are well aware of this constitutional stipulation. But what also intrigues me to no end is the rather cynical assertion by Mr. Egypt Kudoto, described as the Youth Organizer of the Volta regional branch of the National Democratic Congress, that Mrs. Attivor has done absolutely nothing wrong to warrant the rendering of an apology to the nation at large.
Well, the deliberate and calculated assassination of the three Akan high court judges did not trigger any civil chaos in the country. And so why does Mr. Kudoto expect statistically factual pronouncements by prominent Ghanaian citizens like Mr. Osafo-Maafo to have triggered civil strife in the country? Mr. Rawlings may have been quite right to call Ghanaians “a bunch of cowards.” By the way, which group of Ghanaians was Chairman Rawlings referring to, Mr. Kudoto? I bet your guess is as good as mine.
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