Was the GIHOC Divestiture Tenable?

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

Now, I am beginning to fully appreciate my late father’s advice to me some twenty years ago, that I needed to thoroughly divest, as well as divorce, myself from the clinical lunacy that passed for Ghanaian politics, if I was to retain my sanity. Needless to say, we strikingly and eerily continue to witness the kind of lunacy that my father spoke about in the at once torrent and incoherent propagandistic pronouncements being rambunctiously unleashed, on a daily basis, by some wantonly desperate National Democratic Congress party hacks in the barely two months before the December 7, 2012 general election.

In the latest of such pronouncements, a Mr. Selassie Nyadzi, the national coordinator of some nondescript organization called Vote John Again 2012 Network (VOJA), virulently accuses the New Patriotic Party (NPP) of causing the collapse of the erstwhile Ghana Airways Corporation through the sinister act of privatization. Maybe some sober-headed somebody ought to remind the leading member of the Trokosi Wing of the NDC that it was none other than Togbui Avaklasu I (aka Mr. Jeremiah John Rawlings), Patron-Saint of Anloga and founding-patriarch of the NDC, who summarily caused the dismantling and privatization of the Nkrumah-established Ghana Industrial Holdings Corporation (GIHOC).

Indeed, when Nana Akufo-Addo talks about the imperative need to providing free education to Ghanaian youths from elementary to senior high school, the flagbearer of the main opposition New Patriotic Party speaks on the incontrovertible authority of such tried and tested policies as the Kufuor-minted National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), which key NDC operatives and ultimate beneficiaries vehemently opposed when it was initially proposed as a national policy agenda by the NPP.

It is also rather ironic that while the cynical likes of Mr. Nyadzi have been virulently accusing members and supporters of the NPP of preaching a supposedly sinister ideology of a “property-owning democracy,” it is actually the key players of the pseudo-socialist so-called National Democratic Congress who have been recklessly and unconscionably divvying up public and state properties among themselves and their overseas sponsors and cronies, such as many well-meaning Ghanaians witnessed to their horror in the Rawlings-led GIHOC affair. The latter abomination also clearly explains why the Mahama-Arthur-led NDC has been desperately fighting to hang onto power, so that they could bring Togbui Avaklasu’s yesteryear’s snow job to its logical conclusion of, once again, returning our beloved nation’s otherwise robust and thriving economy into the morally untenable state of receivership or mendicancy, otherwise known as HIPC.

Mr. Nyadzi, characteristically, insults the intelligence of Ghanaians when he pompously asserts that the true intention of NPP education policymakers is to privatize public education and, thereby, impede its ready accessibility to the poor and destitute. The fact of the matter is that it is the pseudo-democratic NDC policymakers whose elitism is indisputably evinced by their adamant refusal to grant free access to public education, from kindergarten to senior high school, to our children and grandchildren, even while also paradoxically pledging to build some 200 more senior high schools if their know-nothing party is retained in the seat of governance, come December 7, 2012.

Indeed, it bears scrutiny to also observe that the NDC, which has held the reins of governance for twenty-three of the last thirty-one years, is squarely to blame for the abject climate of obligational dereliction which caused the wanton creation of the legion “schools under trees.” So, really, the Mahama-Arthur posse does itself absolutely no good in patting itself on the back with vacuous claims of having drastically reduced the number of schools under trees.

While the NDC has been hell-bent on shortening the length of high school education and, in effect, the viability and quality of the senior high school curriculum, New Patriotic Party statesmen like Nana Akufo-Addo and Prof. Ameyaw Ekumfi have been working, literally, around the clock to return Ghana to the good, old days when the country’s educational system was the envy of the entire African continent. And so what is the use of establishing vote-seeking mushroom universities whose graduates are highly unlikely to meet the requirements of an increasingly technologically sophisticated domestic and global job-market?

And, by the way, Mr. John Agyekum-Kufuor is, really, the only “John” who has consensually distinguished himself as a democratically elected premier and commander-in-chief of the Ghana Armed Forces. And so it is just not clear precisely why Mr. Nyadzi would either establish or join an electioneering campaign organization whose sole objective appears to be the rallying of support around a presidential candidate, merely because the latter sports the name “John.” This is the kind of lunacy that the old man counseled me against.

By all means, let Mr. Nyadzi and his ilk canvass for votes from door-to-door; but he ought not to hoodwink our longsuffering countrymen and women with a so-called Better Ghana Agenda that never existed beyond the vacuous imagination of the NDC Abongo Boys.

*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 “Dr. J. B. Danquah: Architect of Modern Ghana” (iUniverse.com, 2005). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net. ###