Reconfiguring STX for National Development

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

In the past, I have written passionately about this most rancid deal unwisely struck between a nondescript South Korean construction firm and the Mills-led government of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) that has now definitively and auspiciously fallen through, as it were (See “Bagbin: STX Cannot Gain from Their Failure” Ghanaweb.com 1/4/12).

In announcing, predictably, that the deal that saw the South Korean Vice-President visiting the Ghanaian capital to celebrate the STX scam, for that patently is what it was, the Minister of Water Resources, Works and Housing, Mr. Alban S. K. Bagbin, who was Majority Leader in Parliament at the time that the deal was hatched, bitterly griped that the failure of the deal, a propaganda showcase purportedly aimed at facilitating the epic erection of some 200,000 units of affordable houses for both Ghanaian security personnel and civil servants, had been primarily due to internal wrangling among factions constituting and representing STX. The details appear to have hinged on the fiscal component of the project, a dimension that squarely falls outside the purview of this write-up, as it were.

What is clear, as some of us avid observers of Fourth-Republican Ghanaian political culture have insisted from the outset, is the need for the National Democratic Congress and all future Ghanaian governments to focus their housing development agenda on the peculiar genius of Ghanaian contractors. That is how nations worthy of their designation as such have gone about doing things. And such enviable reputation is not forged by lazily and unimaginatively outsourcing such basic and elementary aspects of our national character, outlook, livelihood and culture as housing construction to foreigners and total strangers, even in an increasingly global political economy.

And as I have also observed in the recent past, it would have been more meaningful and productive if the Mills administration had struck a deal with either the South Korean manufacturers of Kia or Hyundai to establish subsidiaries in Ghana, in order to both encourage job creation and auto-technology transfer. And on the latter score, of course, I am thinking of a comprehensive and long-term national agenda of massively and rapidly modernizing the scores of Suame Magazines and Abossey Okais dotted across the country. It does not also help matters in any way for Mr. Osei Kyei Mensah-Bonsu to be facilely and self-righteously doing an “I told you so” dance over the condign collapse of the grossly ill-conceived and executed STX scam (See “STX Saga: They Said We’re Jealous…. Now We’re Back to Square One” Ghanaweb.com 1/5/12). And it is also on the latter score that I have my own peculiar axe to grind with the likes of Mr. Doe Adjaho, the Deputy Speaker of the House, who seems to have an insufferably obnoxious entitlement attitude towards parliamentary careerism. Recently, for instance, the NDC stalwart was widely reported to be decrying the call of Ghanaian citizens and voters for term limits to be imposed on parliamentary service, on the dubious grounds that such call inadvisably ignored the critical and imperative need of parliamentary experience for the long-term development of Ghanaian democracy.

Needless to say, other than the quadrennial and morally untenable milking of the economically stressed Ghanaian taxpayer in the form of gratuities, Mr. Adjaho would be hard put to justify the institutional significance of a veritable rubber-stamp such as the decidedly white elephant of a National Assembly of the kind of which he so vacuously claims to be chief second-bananas.

On his “I told you so” mantra, maybe some levelheaded adult ought to point out to the Kumasi-Suame MP that the unsavorily routine usage of sheer numbers to bulldoze its agenda through parliamentary proceedings, rather than rational deliberation, is not the peculiar, or especial, preserve of the ruling National Democratic Congress. To be certain, both the NDC and the Kufuor-led New Patriotic Party have equally deftly refined the immitigably lurid and regressive art of “parliamentary bulldozing” into an enviable political praxis.

Nonetheless, what needs to be done now, as even Mr. Mensah-Bonsu, himself, clearly appears to appreciate, is for both parties to prioritize the long-term national development agenda over and above petty ideological squabbles aimed at scoring cheap political points and a few hundred votes at the polling booth. This is what statesmanship is about. And it is in this progressive direction that the Ghanaian politician ought to be aiming, the fever-hot temperature of Election 2012 notwithstanding.

*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 “The Obama Serenades” (Lulu.com, 2011). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net. ###