By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Feb. 13, 2016
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

The New Patriotic Party’s Member of Parliament for Manhyia-South, Dr. Matthew Opoku-Prempeh, is quite accurate to argue that even in countries of greater public safety and higher quality of security, Prime Ministers have been killed (See “ ‘It Costs 10 Times More to Replace MP than Minister’ – ‘Napo’ Wants Security for MPs” Modernghana.com 2/13/16). The obvious reference here, of course, is to the legendary Swedish Prime Minister and former leader of the Swedish Social Democratic Party, Mr. Sven Olof Joachim Palme. Dr. Opoku-Prempeh’s question could be pointedly answered in two ways none of which would support his call for all members of Ghana’s Parliament to be provided with personal and private security detail at the expense of the taxpayer.

First of all, what the Manhyia-South MP’s argument exposes is the fact that absolutely no measure of security protection could be aptly reckoned to be foolproof or hermetically guaranteed against any possible breaches or lapses. In other words, the Ghanaian politician would be living in a fool’s paradise to suppose that merely having a lone policeman or woman guard them around the clock would effectively remove the danger of their being harmed by anybody intent or hell-bent on doing precisely that. In the case of the celebrated Swedish Prime Minister, as yours truly vividly recalls, it was Mr. Palme’s modest and flat refusal to be swamped by a platoon of security detail that may well have tempted his up-to-date unknown assassin to undertake the repulsively ungodly act of gunning down Prime Minister Palme.

We also know that hardworking and progressive and creative and imaginative leaders like President Julius Kambarage Nyerere rode a bike to work, as well as take public transportation, during a remarkable period of his time in office, without any elaborate security detail and was not brought to any serious harm. And so clearly, the problem of the security of the African politician straddles the balance between personal deportment or lifestyle and a combination of factors that have absolutely nothing, whatsoever, to do with whether every Ghanaian parliamentarian is afforded one heavily armed guard paid for by the paradoxically marginally protected Ghanaian taxpayer or not.

I have already spoken to the fact that the average Ghanaian parliamentarian is well-heeled enough to be able to budget and pay for his/her own personal and private security detail. Already, these MPs are afforded generous housing allowances at the expense of the Ghanaian civil servant whose salary and benefit entitlements are routinely and rudely held in arrears by these same politicians who would now have us believe that they are the best thing that ever happened to our beloved nation since either the discovery or invention of Foo-Foo (Fufuo) and palm-nut soup. Dr. Opoku-Prempeh claims that it takes ten times the amount of money that it takes to replace one State Minister or Cabinet Appointee to stage a bye-election for the replacement of a deceased MP, such as my recently brutally assassinated relative, Mr. Joseph Boakye Danquah-Adu, the representative for Akyem-Abuakwa North.

Well, the Manhyia-South NPP-MP could also have been even more brutally frank by adding that the job of a Cabinet Minister is only an avenue for any parliamentarian of a ruling party or government, in the good books of the President, whoever the latter happens to be, to exponentially increase the size of his/her paycheck. In other words, in Fourth-Republican Ghana, the post of a Cabinet Minister is a patent pork-barrel sinecure, a bonus gift for good behavior, and not a real job. It is one for which a prospective parliamentarian spends a lot of money to secure one of those trashy China chairs in the august House in order to be subsequently awarded by the President as a proverbial feather in one’s cap.

And so, really, “Dr. Napo” has absolutely no substantive argument here. Besides, nobody begged any of these grubby parliamentarians to go to Accra and represent them in our National Assembly. Simply and poignantly put, let these MPs use some of the same moneys they have been using to underwrite administrative activities at Party Headquarters to buy themselves their own personal security details. How right Chairman Jerry John Rawlings was, after all, when he shouted, with a stick of joint deftly balanced in-between his lips: “We No Go Sit Down Make Dem Cheat Us Everyday!” “Oh, No!!”

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