File photo: NPP flag
Politics in Africa particularly Ghana is quite interesting and can't stop amusing me. Every day, we become testimonies of contradictory treacherous media blasphemy emanating from the backyards of self-centred political schemers and their surrogates. Well, that sort of vindictiveness and personal scores have persisted for a while and we now gobble them down as wedding wine.
That is normal but where objectivity is sacrificed for political survival, then know that people will do everything humanely possible to survive the quite convoluted and apparently unpredictable political culture. That is my succinct observation which you may disagree or probably not understand but let me expatiate in clear terms.
In my view, Ghanaians did not vote for NPP because of its mouth-watering plethora of promises. I mean the "oneism and freeism." What made the NPP came out with overwhelming victory is their strategy used during the campaign ahead of the 2016 elections. The rehearsed statements on corruption, loot and share, family and friends government, hardship among other notably fanatical slogans, painted the then John Mahama led government as the most "corrupt and incompetent government".
This strategy was largely supported by a certain media cabals that were indescribably hungry for political largesse. This plan was executed with precision and the government of the day was almost helpless in self defense.
As the government and its communicators were trumpeting its achievements and promising more, the NPP simply used phrases and violent threats to throw dust into the eyes of a vast majority of unsuspecting voters. Well, as indicated in my earlier rendition, that is the order of the day in multiparty democracy in Africa where political desperation and extreme quest to destroy political opponents become a center stage. We might have blindly copied the Western Democracy without appreciating the concept in a broader perspective relative to our culture.
One thing that keeps echoing in my mind is that, is corruption a political canker or social canker? In my personal understanding, it is a social canker that has its root deep into the attitudinal culture of the people. Well, NPP and other analysts think otherwise.
Another question is, what constitutes incompetence in governance? When the person fingers out bureaucratic weaknesses and take steps to address them or the person’s ability to defend that those bureaucratic defects do not exist? Ponder over the above questions and you may agree with me that needless defense of odds make you very odd in the comity of leadership. That is the exact situation the NPP has found itself in.
Ever since, the NPP took over power, they have been many incidences of suspected corruption. This, in many instances, come from their own appendages. We have instances where one "big elephant” was accusing the other of taking goats and cows to facilitate appointment, we have the famous stinking BOST contaminated brouhaha, the unaccounted 5% of the controversial Ken Domestic bond. As if that is not enough, now we have their own, telling us there is corruption going on in the flagstaff house where those surrounding the president are figured. In all these, the president is not interested in knowing the real issues. His appointees are fiercely mounting conspicuously inconsistent defence. Many attempts have been made to kill the issues but they remain alive especially when A Plus remains adamant in his commitment to exposing what he knows of. The government says we should go and sleep and watch them act like Jacks and Killers!!!
Just two days ago, District Assemblies were asked to contribute 5,000 each totalling close to 1.3billiom old cedis just to facilitate the tour of the President to the Northern Region. The presidency alone was allocated a whooping amount of about 1.5billion in the 2017 budget. In this matter, people say we should hail him? The lame defence from the local ministry is that it is "ignorant" about the happenings. That is quite interesting. This is just a looting brigade. Simple.
It is rather more sickening that he is not even going for official visits but political tours. In my home region, Upper West, the whole town (Wa, the Regional capital) is decorated with NPP flags and not National flags awaiting the president to come and throw largesse to party footsoldiers. Why won't they defend the contribution of Five thousand Ghana Cedis by each District? It is understandable but let's not allow partisanship to erode our common sense.
The very districts that government agrees that they lack resources and says it wants to assist with a certain one million dollars each, are the very districts it is siphoning now, from the little revenue they generate from the poor and ordinary people. In the cloak of helping the ordinary people, you drink their blood with pride and says it is competence and that we should keep quite? hihihihi...
This is legal dictatorship being implored to enrich few selfish people who rode on the emotions of these very ordinary citizenry into political power.
The president who boasts of incorruptibility probably has a limited understanding of this complex social canker or only decides to compromise his niche in the legal profession only for cheap political rhetoric. Corruption is like a web and the president is now found in it and his appendages dining and competing to cut the best parts of the elephant meat. My friend Derbie Raphael calls it "the rotten underbelly of the elephant."
In all these counterproductive orchestrations by key elements of government, the competent government insists that we should be praising it. To them (NPP Government), they can neither see nor hear of any wrong doings. Well, that is what happens when you are caught in the very web you claim to so much abhor. Hypocrisy and shame won't allow them to see.
I admonish the NPP to hurry up to set up the office of the special prosecutor. They should prosecute those they claim were corrupt. Leave their own out and let them drink and bath in corruption. After all, the illusion of holding on to power persists in their politically adulterated minds!!
Any government that borrows to take care of recurrent expenditure is the most incompetent government. At the time that we are talking about industrialisation with its needed infrastructure, if we still borrow to pay monthly salaries of workers, then we are doomed as a country. How can borrowing to pay workers also be a way of reducing the public dept stock? Extremely ridiculous!!!
Even upon all these borrowing, many workers are still earnestly hoping to get their salaries as thousands of workers are yet to get their September salaries yet they(NPP) are parroting that they are the most economically competent brains the world has ever produced.
That strategy of pretending not to see or hear which I call “see no evil, hear no evil" is an embarrassing strategy that shall ruin the electoral fortunes of the NPP soon. Let no one wrestle with them to rise up and fish out their own corrupt officials. Ghanaians are antagonising this self-seeking strategy only in silence and we shall see the manifestation in due time. It is just a matter of time.
