General News of Wednesday, 2 July 2014

Source: peacefmonline

Sam George weeps: Mahama's appointees are failing him

Several political pundits in the country have questioned the reason why the President speaks to every issue and intervenes in every situation.

They have wondered why the President instead of being the last person to fall, is rather the first.

Samuel George, a member of the Communications Team of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) has also wondered why the various institutions in the country are not working but will rather wait for things to get worse for the President to ‘come in’.

Recently, President John Dramani Mahama had to call into the Black Stars' camp when they threatened to boycott their match with Portugal due to delay in payment of their appearance fees.

Though the Minister of Sports and officials of the Ghana Football Association were there in Brazil with the players, it took the intervention of President Mahama for the players to change their mind.

Again, President Mahama ordered the Finance Ministry to pay an amount of $60 million to offset some of its total debt of Ghc1.8billion to the Bulk Distribution Companies (BDCs) after the country faced ‘an artificial’ shortage in petroleum products.

Using the above scenarios as his basis, Samuel George asked his fellow NDC members heading various institutions why they are exposing President Mahama to ‘public ridicule’.

“I will state emphatically that some of the problems of this government are simply the fact that some of the appointees of the President are grossly failing him. Why are we exposing our president to such attack and bashing?” he quizzed.

According to him, some of the appointees in government are intentionally exposing the President to public ridicule by not doing what they are expected to do.

“I mean how, I mean why? I mean why are we doing this to President Mahama? Has he done anything wrong by appointing the people that he has appointed? Why are they doing this to him? You are appointed to make the system run; (yet) you sit down and allow inefficiency to run down and who gets the flak, the President. Does the president have to get in and give a directive before people work? Is there no pre-emption? Are they not supposed to be experts in their field? Then we can as well scrap all the ministries and let the President take all the decision… Until the President gets in, nothing gets fixed? Why are we doing this to ourselves? It is becoming one too many. We need to up our game; we need to protect our President,” he urged while speaking to Suhiyini Alhassan on Radio Gold.