Mahama Cons Upper-Westerners

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

You would think that leaders like President John “Paradigm-Shift” Dramani Mahama and Vice-President Paa Kwesi Bekoe Amissah-Arthur, Ghana’s first bisexual deputy premier(the man has publicly admitted to paying hush money to a past coital associate), who benefited from President Nkrumah’s free-education policy and the Danquah-founded University of Ghana, would have a remarkable appreciation of the fundamental tools needed for the salutary enhancement of teaching at both the elementary and secondary levels, until you learn to your horror that short of sheer and abject campaign propaganda, Messrs. Mahama and Amissah-Arthur might just as well have trained as gambling-casino operators as the communication specialist and economist that they, respectively, claim to be (See “Minister Applauds Gov’t [sic] Better Agenda” Spyghana.com 9/15/12).

In their latest demonstration of political desperation, the presidential- transition pair were reported to have stormed the Tumu area of the Upper-West Region distributing school buses to some conveniently and strategically selected high schools, in a bid to “massively improving teaching and learning and [professional] conditions of service.”

As a teacher myself, yours truly feels personally violated; for, the most fundamental tools for enhancing pedagogy at almost every level of learning are textbooks and, in our time, internet-accessible computer technology. And then, if these spearheads of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) want to talk about remarkably improving the conditions of service for our teachers, let them start thinking about payments of livable wages and salaries on time, and then housing and healthcare for teachers. Needless to say, this is what the Akufo-Addo-led New Patriotic Party (NPP) campaign on free education, from Kindergarten to the Senior High School level, is squarely about.

And while Minister of State and NDC-Member of Parliament Ms. Alhassan Dubie Halutie may be forgiven for her gaping exhibition of abject and crass ignorance of what constitutes the effective teaching of our youths and children, it is still not clear precisely what she means when the Ministerial-MP boldly and, almost, proudly asserts that the lone passenger bus presented to the staff and students of the Tumu Senior High Technical School “will motivate those in the practical teaching and learning [disciplines], as well as improve standards in sporting activities and tourism.” Ms. Halutie also, reportedly, went on to lament what she termed as “education deficit” in the East Sissale district, which this lone school bus insultingly thrown at the people of Tumu is designed to drastically reduce. Now it begins to make sense what Nana Akufo-Addo means when the New Patriotic Party’s presidential candidate for Election 2012 and former Justice Minister accuses his main rivals and political opponents of clinically lacking the vision and requisite cognitive capacity to “think big” for the rapid development of Ghana and ahead of the immediate needs and desires of the present generation.

What personally bothers yours truly, though, is when key operatives of the Mahama-Arthur rag-tag team talk about infrastructural development of a woefully deprived Upper-West Region, and the northern-half of the country in general, almost as if it is 1957 all over again, with the vampire-Brits having just abandoned a brutally and unremittingly savaged economy with the prime potentiality of becoming the West African Showcase to the rest of the global community. The fact of the matter is that short of blindly and unconscionably lining their pockets and those of their cronies and foreign collaborators – a la judgment-debt payments – the Rawlings-founded National Democratic Congress has done a piddling little for the development of the country during the last thirty-odd years, two decades out of which the NDC ruled the roost unopposed.

Of course, the facile logic of Messrs. Mahama and Amissah-Arthur is that so abjectly deficient is the proverbial average Ghanaian of a long-term memory capacity that the sort of “revolutionary accountability” pontifically preached by the priggish – or self-righteous – likes of founding-patriarch Rawlings and Mr. Kofi Totobi Quakyi are the farthest things on the minds of potential and eligible Ghanaian voters.

Once again, both Education Minister Lee Ocran, and Vice-President Amissah-Arthur demonstrated their jointly and severally abject disregard for truth and moral integrity, when the two rascals told the people of Tumu that the acquisition of school buses was the most effective method of ensuring academic improvement in the country. And as usual, Mr. Ocran also contradicted himself by adding that “more than 70 Senior High Schools will be connected to the internet by the end of October 2012.”

Actually, what the defeated former Jomoro Constituency NDC-Member of Parliament had meant to say is that some 70 out of the reported 206 school buses on the Santa Clausian circuit would be hooked up to the internet by the close of Election 2012, in order to enhance the promotion of more Chinese gravediggers at the Flagstaff House and Geese Park. Not such a bad idea, at all, were the reader to ask me.

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is Director of The Sintim-Aboagye Center for Politics and Culture and author of “Sounds of Sirens: Essays in African Politics and Culture”(iUniverse.com, 2004). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net. ###