Will President Mahama also Build a University for Kayayei?

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

It is rather surprising that the Mahama-led regime of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), in pooh-poohing Nana Akufo-Addo’s policy proposal of establishing hostel facilities for Kayayei, largely in our urban municipalities across the country, has not counter-suggested the relatively far more comprehensive, and constructive, establishment of a University of Kayayei, the way the Mills-Mahama regime was magically quick to “establish” specialist-oriented university colleges in the Volta and Brong-Ahafo regions. Perhaps such a university could even be located somewhere in the Bole-Bamboi district of the Northern Region, whose constituents the native-born Mr. Mahama served for many years in Ghana’s parliament.

Interestingly, as one of my cousins, a recently invested Ghanaian township chief, brilliantly interjected, how does President Mahama expect to efficiently prepare his “little sisters” – those are his own words, mind you, dear reader – for gainful training and employment as hairdressers and beauticians, when these potential job candidates do not even have basic housing facilities in which to take a bath and dress up to be interviewed for these occupational opportunities?

Equally poignantly, my own wife, a “retired” dressmaker and petty trader, also questioned whether Transitional-President Mahama had already established hair salons and dressmaking shops for the purpose.

In all this, though, what is shocking is the apparently flat and adamant refusal by the president and his National Democratic Congress cohorts to accept the glaring fact that the rape- and forced prostitution-prone Kayayei ought to first have their personal safety and dignity jealously guarded and avidly protected before placing any of them into meaningful training programs and subsequent careers!

Indeed, the very notion that making hostel facilities available to these economically significant service-industry workers is patently scandalous, as the President seems to believe, is one of the many signal differences between Mr. Mahama and his main political opponent. In essence, the unabashedly elitist Mr. Mahama clearly appears to have little regard, if any at all, for these bona fide Ghanaian citizens, while Nana Akufo-Addo feverishly works towards affording them a decent and qualitative livelihood.

The irony here, though, is that Mr. Mahama rather vacuously and hypocritically believes that the mere fact of him having been born in the Northern Region, affords him peremptory right to singularly decide what constitutes the most ideal life and career choices for the Kayayei.

And it is the preceding facts on which the decision of who qualifies to be elected or retained as president, come December 7, 2012, ought to be partially but significantly based. Indeed, the fact that Nana Akufo-Addo has lived most of his life in the highly deprived Nima Community, known to be heavily dominated by Ghanaians of northern descent and abjectly poor but, nevertheless, decent immigrants and migrants is, perhaps, what makes the New Patriotic Party presidential candidate appear to be humanistic and compassionate, and sensitive, towards the plight of these head-porters.

On the other hand, the Achimota-bragging and ultra-elitist President John Dramani Mahama largely gloats in waxing tribal and sophomorically vacuous about the grim existence of the Kayayei. And it is primarily because of his wantonly superficial and crassly insensitive attitude towards the plight of the Kayayei that makes Mr. Mahama think of Nana Akufo-Addo’s laudable, albeit admittedly stop-gap, policy of building hostel facilities for the Kayayei in snorting terms of symptoms.

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D. Department of English SUNY-Nassau, Garden City, New York Nov. 2, 2012 ###