By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Last week, when he trudged a 100-meter alleyway in Abeka, the well-known suburb of Accra, a Ghana News Agency (GNA) reporter commended him for defying the scorching sun, almost as if to suggest that his presidential campaign competitors had been, somehow, inexplicably exempted from the tropical Ghanaian laws of Nature. Barely 24 hours later, he stood in the Asante-Regional township of New Edubiase aspersing erratically that no political party could claim monopoly over “any stronghold.”
Need readers be reminded of the fact that Prof. John Evans Atta-Mills belongs to a political party whose leaders have been brazenly bragging about the Volta Region being their electoral World Bank for about four electoral terms, or 16 years, now?
As we hinted earlier, when politicians begin to use such jaundiced language of unprovoked belligerence, they must be despondently staring at the sullen face of certain and imminent defeat. Still, the former Legon law school associate professor managed to put on a brave face and to foolhardily declare that a “will [sic] of change was blowing over the country” that was indicative of the supposedly unprecedented ”hardship” into which the people had been engulfed (Ghanaweb.com 10/17/08). The man whose party recently and shamelessly attempted to extort undeserved credit for the New Patriotic Party-implemented National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), then offered himself as a viable alternative to the Kufuor government, whose globally-acclaimed yeomanly performance he arrogantly dismissed as one that was characterized by “failed promises, divisionism, corruption and parochialism which would bring in their wake suffering and incompetence.”
The perennial flagbearer of the so-called National Democratic Congress (NDC), doubtlessly, must have envisaged the people of New Edubiase to have recently immigrated into the country. Perhaps in the colorful and surreal imagination of Prof. Atta-Mills, the Chief and people of New Edubiase just immigrated into Ghana from the Ivory Coast. Which largely explains why the former Vice-President of Ghana could not tell the people of New Edubiase precisely why he firmly believes that the patently self-serving and outright insensitive Cash-and-Carry health policy of the National Democratic Congress was more foresighted, inclusive and competent than the ruling New Patriotic Party’s comprehensive and cross-class, cross-ethnic and cross-cultural National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS). Perhaps we need to explain to Prof. Atta-Mills the edifying fact that even the United States of America, the most economically and militarily powerful in the world, has yet to implement a comprehensive National Health Insurance Scheme. Which, in essence, means that through the laudable implementation of the NHIS, the government of the ruling New Patriotic Party has solidly put Ghana on the path towards a first-world development status. For, it is only such post-industrially advanced countries as Canada, Britain and France, among a handful of others, that proudly boast of having a health policy that accounts for the well-being of all of its citizens and legal residents.
Likewise, Ghanaian voters need to be reminded of the grim fact that the now-opposition National Democratic Congress spent twenty years dismantling almost all the institutional facilities that differentiated a civilized Ghana from a state of perdition and anomy, as has been widely witnessed in places like Rwanda, Burundi, Sierra Leone, Congo (DRC) and Liberia, among others. In other words, the Rawlings-led regimes of the P/NDC, for twenty protracted years, launched a relentless war of civic mayhem, human rights abuse and naked robbery against the hardworking and law-abiding people of Ghana.
Couple the salutary National Health Insurance Scheme implemented by the New Patriotic Party government with the equally salutary policy of free-elementary education and the experimental school-feeding program, and one begins to have a palpable sense that in terms of administrative competence and leadership foresight and creative vision, the New Patriotic Party is at the cutting-edge of progress, whereas the predatory, pseudo-socialist and populist National Democratic Congress has yet to emerge from the Neolithic (or the New-Stone) Age. And on the latter score, almost every well-meaning Ghanaian elector is agreed on the fact that the last direction in which any citizen would want to be led is that of the barbaric and outright unconscionable regime of rampant extra-judicial assassinations, mushroom and kangaroo courts disguised as the People’s Courts.
Last Friday, seeming to have forgotten the glaring fact of New Edubiase teeming with Ghanaian citizens who are as well-educated as the former Temple University, Philadelphia, Visiting Professor, the Rawlings-appointed NDC presidential candidate cavalierly asserted: “I continue to say that I was once a teacher and I know what it takes to develop the human resources of the teacher; and I was also as a former Vice-President, the Chairman of the Police Council and know the inner workings of the Police.”
Needless to say, the preceding was also the weakest political campaign plank for Prof. Atta-Mills to have facilely presumed to predicate his academic and pedagogical credentials. First of all, under both P/NDC governments, in which Prof. Atta-Mills played significant roles, the working conditions of Ghanaian educators were at their lowest ebb; and so was the quality and global standing of Ghanaian education, particularly in the critical disciplines of Language, Mathematics and the Sciences. And so it is a wonder precisely what the University of Ghana- and London-trained Prof. Atta-Mills means when he brags about being professionally conversant with the human-resource development of Ghanaian educators.
Then also, as Nana Akufo-Addo, the presidential candidate of the ruling New Patriotic Party recently pointed out with comprehensive statistical evidence, under the leadership of the so-called National Democratic Congress, the number of police personnel per capita, or their proportional representation among the general population, regressed by at least 60-percent, going by standards recommended by such august global authorities as the United Nations. And so why all this hot air about the P/NDC flagbearer having been an ex-officio Chairman of the Police Council, particularly when the former one-term Vice-President of Ghana has absolutely no professional training in law-enforcement, whatsoever?
As usual, the former Legon tax-law lecturer also took another lame jab at the ruling New Patriotic Party. “It is one thing having an efficient tax system and another thing increasing tariffs without prudent management of revenue collected from the people and corporate bodies.”
What chutzpah on the part of the key economic representative of a party that never learned to either put together an efficient system of taxation for the benefit of Ghana, or how to effectively appropriate public funds for national development, besides wanton and routine embezzlement and abject wastefulness; and a party which, in opposition, has spent most of its time, energy and monetary resources defending petty thieves and big-time muggers of our national coffers!
*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 the author of 18 books, including “Selected Political Writings” (Atumpan Publications/ lulu.com, 2008). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@aol.com.
