By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
During the twenty years that the hard-nosed and predatory operatives of the so-called Provisional/National Democratic Congress (P/NDC) literally held Ghanaians by our scruff, they only succeeded in running the country's economy down the tubes. Our national currency, the risibly labeled "Ghana Cedi," was made a veritable shinplaster lacking any appraisal respectability both within and without the country. Back then, Ghanaians preferred to use the dollar as a domestic medium of exchange, for most of us had a hard time figuring out the gazillion zeros that invariably resulted in a currency exchange between the Cedi and almost all other currencies around the globe.
It would take eight years of yeomanly efforts by the Kufuor-led New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the genius initiatives of Drs. Paul Acquah and Mahamudu Bawumia, among several others, to sanitarily revaluate the Cedi. Sadly, albeit predictably, today the P/NDC nation-wreckers are back at the helm of affairs doing what they do best - gleefully running down our culture and the economy and thumbing their noses at the "learning-disabled" voters who sadistically returned them to power.
For the NDC Abongo boys and girls, "regression" is just another chic word for "progression," and so we continue to mark time in the dubious name of a "Better Ghana Agenda." To hear the NPP-Member of Parliament for Offinso-North, Mr. Collins Ntim, tell the true story of the "Better Ghana Agenda" is peevishly flabbergasting. It also lucidly explains why the vanguard executive operatives of the Mahama government continue to vacuously rail against the otherwise civically laudable implementation of the Single-Spine Salary Scale or regime.
In the scandalous opinion of the Mahama gravy-train riders, the equitable distribution of the fruits of the sweat and toil of the Ghanaian civil servant, and blue-collar worker, is squarely to blame for the current economic depression facing the country at large. A simpler way of putting the foregoing plaint is that Single-Spine is practically and decidedly unrealistic, because the very charitable and humanistic Biblical concepts of "fairness" and "equity" are both patently ungodly and philosophically absurd.
In the warped opinion of the Mahama posse, the natural human inclination is to have a moiety of our citizens practically and effectively enslaved and perpetually underpaid, while the other moiety literally lived high on the hog. Even the Big Kumasi Cheese has recently been widely quoted and reported by the media to be vehemently opposed to the Single-Spine Salary Revolution.
That the pontifically tough-talking and self-righteous Chairman Jerry John Rawlings woefully failed to implement a Single-Spine Salary Scale in the twenty long years that he imperiously ruled the roost, makes one wonder what all his stentorian talk about "transparency, probity and accountability" was about. Talk, it has been said, is cheap. And you bet, dear reader, talk is cheap, indeed! Now, after expediently declaring a 10-percent reduction in the humongous salaries of his cabinet appointees and himself, President Mahama has dared his critics to follow suit by causing just a 2-percent reduction in their salaries to prove their patriotism. It is almost as if the Bole-Bamboi, Gonja, native were the medieval feudal lord of a sprawling manor called Ghana.
Anyway, according to Mr. Collins Ntim, the Offinso-North NPP-MP, after fiscally projecting the establishment of some 450 community-health centers across the nation in the 2012 budget, the Mahama government was only able to deliver on 19 of such existentially critical facilities. All in all, the government had initiated only 25 of such projects throughout the 2012-13 fiscal year. Now, dear reader, that amounts to less than 5-percent fulfillment of the NDC's so-called "Better Ghana Agenda" (See "'Mahama Playing Games With Our Health' - MP" Daily Guide/Ghanaweb.com 12/1/13).
Then, again, who said these pathologically cynical Cash-and-Carry healthcare policymakers had ever been intent on making life any better for low-income pregnant and nursing Ghanaian mothers, but themselves?!
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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
Dec. 1, 2013
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
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