No, You Have Actually Induced Proverty, Vice-President Amissah-Arthur!

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

Garden City, New York

July 26, 2014

E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

When in the wake of the "mysterious" passing of President John Evans Atta-Mills, on July 24, 2012, the then-Interim President John Dramani Mahama picked then-Governor of the Bank of Ghana, Mr. Kwesi Bekoe Amissah-Arthur as his Vice-President and running-mate for Election 2012, there was strong and widespread suspicion that the latter's choice had anything to do with everything but Mr. Mahama's interest in repairing the badly damaged Ghanaian economy.

Nearly two years later, the skeptics have been proven to have been right on the money, as my New York City hometown folks are wont to say. Back then, of course, it was all-too-obvious that President Mahama's choice of his arch-lieutenant was viscerally predicated upon crude pandering to the traumatized Fante sensibilities over the swift and shocking loss of President Atta-Mills. The Gonja-born Mr. Mahama would follow up on such pandering by rather boorishly playing on the tribal sentiments of the Fante people. At a durbar in the Central Regional Capital of Cape Coast, Mr. Mahama would publicly and hysterically cry like a baby and accompany - in retrospect - his crocodile tears with the following well-rehearsed and orchestrated plea:

"Please, Chiefs and Elders, make me your son; make me the beloved nephew of Prof. Mills. Prof. Mills was my mentor and my best friend. I am grateful for this great opportunity that he afforded me to be your leader today." Those were, of course, not the exact cri-de-coeur words of Little Dramani, but they strikingly capture his hyperbolical sentiments at the time. In reality, the man seemed uncontrollably happy that the recently deceased former Legon tax-law professor had "mysteriously" transitioned at the time that he did. It was almost like an accident according to plan, as many Ghanaians are wont to say. Remember that Freudian Mahama gush of, "God in His wisdom has seen it fit to opportunely remove Prof. Mills and place me in his stead"?

Well, I keep repeating the fact that President Mills died "mysteriously" because two years on, the Flagstaff House, or the Presidency, as our country's seat of governance is called these days, has yet to officially disclose precisely why and how the man died. Yes, it had been widely known that the mild-mannered former Rawlings arch-lieutenant was terminally ill with some malignant form of cancer. But nobody from the office of President Mahama has, to-date, been able to publicly give Ghanaian citizens a minute-by-minute account of the particular circumstances leading up to the demise of President Mills on that fateful day of July 24, 2014.

Anyway, Vice-President Amissah-Arthur gave the proverbial lie to the government's insistence on having drastically reduced the rate of person-to-person (or individual) poverty in the country when, at a recent civil-service conference in the Asante Regional Capital of Kumasi, Mr. Amissah-Arthur noncommitally attributed the general developent of the country to the efforts of successive Ghanaian governments since 1957: "Our middle-income status vindicates the accumulation of growth strategies that have been adopted in this country since independence."

Predictably, the Vice-President did not tell his audience precisely what measures his government had put in place to ensure the salutary maintenance of the "growth strategies" that he had alluded to. And the keen observer of Ghana's political scene did not need to stretch his/her imagination any farther to come to the grim realization that Mr. Amissah-Arthur had absolutely no worthwhile or meaningful "growth strategies" to talk about, except, of course, the understated hints of the so-called Senchi Economic Confab whose report he recently submitted to his boss.

Once again, like all the other cynics, both among the ranks of the ruling National Democratic Congress and the main opposition New Patriotic Party, Mr. Amissah-Arthur attempted to shamelessly fault the equity-oriented Single Spine Salary Structure for the current economic mess which was almost singularly created by the gross incompetence of the Mahama government, beginning with the wastesul spending of the people's money on his 2012 electioneering campaign, as aptly observed by Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia not quite awhile ago.

In sum, rather than put the blame for the dismal productivity of the civil service sector squarely at the doorstep of his own government, the Vice-President self-righteously and hypocritically pretended as if it was the generally hardworking Ghanaian civil servant who did not deserve his/her modest salary, rather than criminally overpaid executive operatives like himself and his boss.

In other words, what do executive big cheeses like Vice-President Amissah-Arthur and Little Dramani gain by talking with a forked tongue?

_______________________________________________________