Opinions of Thursday, 14 April 2016

Columnist: Okoampa-Ahoofe, Kwame

Show us the jobs, Mr. Mubarak

As far as I am concerned, Mr. Muntaka Mubarak, the National Democratic Congress’ Member of Parliament for Kumasi-Asawase, has absolutely no credibility whatsoever. He is the same moral reprobate, and pathological degenerate, who not quite long ago was staunchly advocating for the marriageable age of Ghanaian women to be pegged at 14 or 16 years old. He even wanted to tribalize the issue by bifurcating into a northern and southern Ghanaian divide. One wonders why he chose to represent any group of humans in, of all places, the Asante regional heartland of Kumasi.

Mr. Mubarak has also been widely alleged to have consorted with a female as young as 14 years old, by who he has also been rumored to have produced a child. In any civilized society such act of gross sexual depravity would be legally characterized as statutory rape, and Mr. Mubarak would be spending some time in prison, rather than lording it on the august floor of Parliament acting as Chief Majority Whip. I mean, the guy is morally, psychologically and intellectually too retarded to think and believe that he can cavalierly impose this most regressive and primitive conjugal cultural standard on the majority of civilized Ghanaians.

It does not seem to have occurred to him that at below 18 years of age, most Ghanaian females are practically children, the bulk of whom would not have been adequately equipped with the requisite educational and vocational skills necessary to eke out a decent living. The man is the practical equivalent of a certified pedophile; but, of course, in the Ghana in which we presently find ourselves, where the proverbial roost is ruled by constitutionally indemnified murderers and scam-artists, it is hardly any wonder that Mr. Mubarak would be wielding the third most powerful post among the membership of our parliamentary majority.

What we are concerned with here right now, however, is Mr. Mubarak’s rather asinine claim that during the last 6 years, the Mahama-led government of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) has created some 400,000 jobs (See “We Have Created 400,000 Jobs in 6 Years – Muntaka” MyJoyOnline.com / Ghanaweb.com 4/8/16). It is not clear whether, indeed, the NDC has created 400,000 jobs, because the news article whose caption carried the preceding figure also quoted Mr. Mubarak as having asserted that President John Mahama had created some 346,000 jobs and intended to create even more if he was afforded the nod in November, and the mandate to “misrule” the country for a second 4-year term.

Now, even my 8-year-old third-grader, Papa Osofo Yaw Sintim, knows that there is a vast difference between 400,000 jobs and 346,000 jobs. He knows from his Math class that when you round up 346,000 jobs to the nearest 100,000, you get 300,000 jobs and not 400,000 jobs. In other words, statistically speaking, President Mahama and his Abongo Boys and Girls, as well, ought to have created at least 350,000 jobs in order to arrive at the rounded figure of 400,000 jobs.

But the preceding propagandistic poppycock is not even my beef with Mr. Mubarak. Rather, it is the fact that the Asawase constituency bully does not tell Ghanaians precisely in what sectors of the country’s economy these jobs were created, and also whether these were long-term/permanent or short-term /temporary jobs. I mean, we are talking about the economy of a country in which nearly half of all teachers have had their salaries locked up in arrears by President Mahama for at least two years.

Then also, Mr. Mubarak suavely and disingenuously claims that the ballpark figure of youth unemployment in Ghana is approximately 2 million. Now, this is simply ridiculous. My educated guess is that the figure is in the vicinity of 6 million. And so he is damn right, Mr. Mahama and his cronies cannot pat themselves on their backs and party over their dismal record on job creation.

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