In our Ghanaian cultural setting, we have always done the noble thing of protecting the sanctity of the elderly when it comes to how we portray them in the public eye. This cultural norm is what people often use as a yard-stick to castigate those who often raise issues with the health of president Atta-Mills. In a way, such criticism can be justified in the perspective of our cultural norms but the point is, our nation is governed by constitution and not cultural norms. This then justifies the concerns being raised by the ordinary Ghanaian, as regards the president’s current state of health.

The constitution spells out the state of mind a president is supposed to be in so that undue advantage is not taken by his close aides to take decisions that are reserved only for him/her. This is because, the people of this nation go to the polls, every 4years, to elect someone and invest in him/her all the powers of state. So, if we go through all this hustle only for people who have found themselves at the seat of power just by mere praise-singing to be taking decisions on our behalf, then we are surely being short-changed. There are no greedy bastards in the White House Now, following issues of Atta-Mills’ health becoming topical, the selfish people around him have always come up with the argument that there was once an American president who was confined to wheel-chair but was still able to govern. This is a fact, but what these insipid propagandists fail to tell the people of this country is the fact that, that wheel-chair-bound American president was able to perform his duties because he had efficiently conscientious patriotic Americans around him. Again, institutions in America are well efficient, corruption is extremely jettisoned and when it is found to have occurred, the punishment has always been swift and caustic.

I remember David Blanket who served as secretary for education under the tenure of British Prime Minister Anthony Linton Blair (Tony Blair), is a complete blind person but he was able to pioneer one of the most innovative reforms in girl-child education which saw girls actually out-classing boys, academically, at the basic level. So the fact that a person is challenged in one way or the other doesn’t really matter only if the systems and environment in which he/she is to operate are well-oiled.

However, currently in Ghana, our state institutions are way off the mark when it comes to efficiency. This is largely due to lack of resource by way of material and often human capacity. Budget allocations for vital state institutions as Agric,Education etc., have been found to be way below that which is allocated for the presidency.Effectively,we currently have a bunch of characters in government whose way of thinking is clearly in the opposite direction.Priororitation of programmes has always been tainted by electioneering bigotry where development projects are haphazardly dotted around the country, just like Swiss-cheese-holes, with no regard to how it will help to coordinate development within a given catchment area.

Again, it is now a known fact that those around the president simply don’t mean well for him and the nation at large. This is because, these people have realized that the president is currently incapacitated as a result of ill-health and has therefore gone hay-wire and jumping up and down like male squirrels on heat, in their frantic acts of plain-faced looting of our nation’s coffers!!! Ghana’s new foreign income earner

“Judgment debts” have now become Ghana’s biggest foreign income earner for these greedy bastards at the seat of government and their platoon of insipid propagandists. Praise-singing has now become the sole requirement for a juicy political appointment while senseless pronouncements against opposition figures are being hoisted as the flag of unalloyed loyalty.

As we speak, the president is clearly not in the position to read official correspondences by himself while critical decisions reserved for him to take are being taken, without his knowledge, by gluttonous bastards who couldn’t cater for their nuclear families, just a little over 3years ago. These people have now arrogated to themselves, all presidential powers to even fire and hire managing directors of state corporations, by just issuing a highly offensive verbal flatulent decrees.

Heartless greedy bastards

But what really worries me, and I believe most other well-meaning citizens of our dear nation, is this senseless belligerence of these greedy bastards around the president, in portraying him as someone with the strength of King Kong and energy of a lactating lioness. None of us is privy to the president’s medical records but there is this famous Ghanaian axiom that says ‘se woanti se nsu ato a, ennti adekye ye nnso wo ennhu se fomu afo’ to wit “if you didn’t hear the rain falling, can’t you also see that the ground is wet during day time’? The president returned from the G-8 summit in Washington and went into complete oblivion which actually escaped Ghanaians until the disturbances erupted across six out of ten regions of our dear nation. At such periods in any nation, the leader is naturally expected to come out and make a pronouncement and to assure the populace of government’s efforts to curb the tide of chaos and restore peace in order to provide safe and secure environment for law abiding people to go about their normal lawful duties. But this wasn’t happening and absolutely no communication was also coming from the presidency as to what was happening to our president. As such, tongues began to wag and all sorts of rumours were justifiably peddled.

The president then popped-out at the VVIP lounge of our nation’s premiere airport and proclaimed that “I’m not dead” and that he was on his way out to America to “sit down with my lawyers for some routine medical checks” and then “return to sit down with my doctors to get on with my work”. Clearly, the man is not of himself by way of sound mind since a healthy mind can only be found in a healthy body. This is a proven fact but the greedy bastards around him are still claiming he is as sound as a supersonic jet.

Last week Wednesday,24th June,2012, Atta-Mills went to NDC party headquarters and declared "will win the upcoming December 7th elections by 57%".Now,since the inception of Ghana’s 4th republican constitution, incumbent presidents have always dropped over 4% of votes obtained during their first election, when they contest for second term of office.Ironically,this is a man who won the 2008 elections by a hair's breadth figure of 35,000(50.03%) as against 49.90% obtained by the NPP.So,even a drop of 1% will conveniently lands him in opposition. And as a president, he has superintended over the most gargantuan officially sanctioned stealing of billions of dollars of our tax monies under the cloak of "judgment debt" while his administration has been the most useless in our nation's history. So the question then is: is Atta-Mills actually in-touch with the realities on the ground?

Where is Atta-Mills’ immediate family?

The current image of the man casts a pale shadow of himself. The question then is; why are these greedy bastards around the man exposing him to this level of gargantuan public ridicule by way of deceiving Ghanaians that he is well, just so they can continue displaying him as a pitifully unattractive campaign bill-board?

Indeed, if saint Atta-Mills was my family member, I would have initiated a swift court action to free him from the grips of these greedy pigs that are holding him hostage so that I could take him to the famous Edumfa prayer camp(C/R) for spiritual healing. I really wonder if any of these greedy bastards currently holding the president hostage, will pressurize his/her father to hang onto a demanding job of an executive president of Ghana, if he was in the state of health Atta-Mills currently finds himself.

Ghanaians, Atta-Mills’ pronouncements before he left Ghana three weeks ago and what he said upon his return and the behavior he put up at the Airport by dancing ‘azonto’ on the tarmac, has confirmed my belief that, all is not well mentally and physically with him so the greedy bastards who are holding him hostage just so they can continue with their gargantuan looting of state coffers, must quickly save him from these nauseatingly nauseating public spectacle by setting him free to enable him concentrate on matters of his health!!!

Justice Abeeku Newton-Offei E-mail: justnoff@yahoo.com