In the art of persuasion, one can use different methods to persuade his/her audience. One of the methods is to appeal to the emotions of the audience. This can be achieved by making emotional statements and also by the use of images; these images can be visual or cognitive.
If one is called to give an account for how money obtained in the name of the people of Ghana was spent and the person ends up making emotional statements and gets to the verge crying in order to prove to the people that he/she did the best to manage the money, then some discerning ‘’ordinary Ghanaians’’ will have questions in their minds. I have personally never seen any top management person successfully using tears to defend his/her work. Have you seen one before?
If one who was supposed to be a sector Minister for over 23 million people is not able to answer confidently how much money was spent on each person in a group of 612 people he took to Brazil then how can that minister account for resources that are allocated to him to take care of over 23 million people.
According to the minister, between $5000 and $6000 was budgeted for each supporter, so if we even do a calculation of $4000 for each of the 612 people it will amount to $ 2,448,000 and the total expenditure according to the minister was GHC 4,483, 262. If GHC 4,483,262 is divided by 612, we will have something around GHC 7326.18, when that is converted to dollars which was around GHC 3 to a dollar around the time; it will then stand at $2442.06 for each supporter. This amount will even be less considering the fact that other bills like the presidential ball, media relations; entertainment etc was paid from the said amount that was raised for the supporters to be sent to Brazil. Would anything lesser than $ 2500 pay for air tickets, accommodation and feeding for one supporter as they had already done their research and estimated between $ 5000 and $ 6000 for each supporter? With my JSS ‘’teacher Nimo’’ maths, I know the account is not balancing and tears will not balance the equation but proper records will do, so honourable minister, we don’t want to see tears, we want to see accurate figures because after over one month of Brazil 2014, you should have all your figures accurate as a competent minister of state rendering account for just a single event that occurred under your watch as minister of youth and sports.
The images that where shown the people of Ghana was all well and good but our question remains: did management do its work well? 16 countries were eliminated from the tournament after the group games but hardly did we hear or see the kind of off the pitch mess that happened in our camp. In as much I condemn the action of the players to stay away from two training sections as reported; I also like to remind our leaders that our old folks have a saying that for a fish to go bad it starts from the head.
Was it prudent to pay GHC 22,857 for a new website while the GFA has a website that always updates fans? How would Ghanaians know exactly how much was paid to the caterers out of the reported GHC 1,953,096.35 that was spent on feeding and accommodation since there was no formal contract between the ministry and the caterers?
As ignorant as we may seem as ‘’ordinary Ghanaians,’’ we are aware of the techniques in the art of persuasion and some of us will not fall for that, we therefore need less of the pathos and more accurate figures.
Kenneth Nii Yeboah
King_ken2@yahoo.com