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

It is rather sad for leaders like Vice-President John Dramani Mahama to facilely and cavalierly presume to mortgage Ghana’s new-found oil wealth at the damnable expense of both presently living Ghanaians and posterity (See “It Will [sic] Be Foolish Not To Collateralize Our Oil For Credit – John Mahama” MyJoyOnline.com 11/29/10).
Sad because both Mr. Mahama and key operatives of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) do not seem to remarkably appreciate the need for the government to draw up a comprehensive plan for the sustainable development of the country, well before contracting the sort of humongous loans that they have been inundating our country with over the past twenty-two months.
For what Ghanaian leaders ought to be seriously discussing right now is “sustainable development,” not the vacuous, cosmetic, desperate and massive construction projects of the kind inordinately indulged by President Nkrumah and his infamous Convention People’s Party (CPP) of the First Republic, which had no organic coherence, with regard to cultural maintenance and adequately trained indigenous personnel to manage such national assets. The result of such reckless and callow attitude towards development is, today, evidenced by such reparative eyesores as the Adomi (or Senche/Senkye) Bridge and the haltingly productive and virtual white elephant that is the Akosombo Dam. The least observed about our decrepit rail and road networks, the better.
Mr. Mahama also appears to be inexorably poised towards the massive construction of healthcare facilities; and so, perhaps, it is not altogether out of place to demand what comprehensive plan, it is, that he has so far laid before Parliament, regarding how to make our already existing major and minor health facilities function beyond the soul-cringing level of hulking morgues and veritable centers of disease propagation. I bet that if he is reading this article and is half-honest with himself, the Vice-President must be scratching his head like Mr. Wisdom-Pot Ananse and wondering why he hadn’t bagged that one up his noggins.
Now, let us flashback to the Mabey and Johnson racket, in which the NDC government, chaperoned by the irrepressibly self-righteous Mr. Rawlings, engineered the most corrupt pontine-development scheme in recent memory, and New Patriotic Party (NPP) secretary Kwadwo Owusu-Afriyie (“Sir John”) is not wide off the mark when he speculates that the motive behind the febrile NDC attempt to amending the Fourth-Republican Constitution vis-à-vis the distribution of our oil wealth may be anything but theft-proof.
Mr. Mahama also claims that the Norwegians who, allegedly, helped Ghanaians in crafting that aspect of our Fourth-Republican Constitution regarding the appropriation of our oil wealth reserved the luxury, in their own peculiar case, of futuristically reserving most of the proceeds from their oil wealth, because the proverbial “black gold” came into the budgetary equation in an already industrialized Norway. That may well be the case. But does it really boost his status as the second-most-powerful Ghanaian politician for Mr. Mahama to lamely suggest that, somehow, since a remarkable percentage of our citizens are submerged in abject penury, it stands to reason for contemporary Ghanaians to blindly appropriate our new-found oil wealth, almost as if there were no tomorrow?
To the preceding effect, this is what the Vice-President is quoted as saying: “But you [i.e. We Ghanaians] live in a country where women are dying because the road from their village to the health facility is not done; and you say that the oil God has blessed us with, we should leave it to generations and generations but she must die today because she can’t go to the hospital. I mean that is…absolutely baloney.”
I thought one of the salient bragging rights of the NDC was that under Chairman Rawlings, the governing party constructed more roads than any other government since 1957!
Well, not only is such scurrilous use of language grossly unbecoming of the traditional personality and image of a Ghanaian vice-president, it constitutes the very height of hypocrisy for a man who was fervidly championing a “Cash-and-Carry” healthcare regime just a little over three years ago, to be speaking almost as if Ghanaians were thoroughly bereft of any memory banks.
Actually, more Ghanaian women, both expectant and indisposed, have died under NDC governance trying to secure exorbitant medical fees than simply trying to reach the nearest health center, or hospital, by unmacadamized roads.
On a more serious note: what needs to happen now to put the proverbial brakes on visionless leaders like Mr. Mahama, is for the parliamentary minority leader, Mr. Kyei Mensah-Bonsu, to introduce an amendment bill that seeks to severely punish politicians who recklessly betray public fiduciary trust. Such punishment could, for example, entail the summary expropriation of the personal wealth and/or property of culprits, excluding one home and a car.
Indeed, were the possibility of such sanction in place, the likes of the former Information minister and Gonja MP would be more careful and mindful of their public pronouncements and deeds.

*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 a Governing Board Member of the Accra-based Danquah Institute. His forthcoming anthology of poetry is titled “The Obama Serenades.” E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net.
###