June 27th, 2012
STATEMENT BY THE TRUE SQUAD OF THE PPP

MILLS DOES NOT DESERVE A SECOND TERM

*A response to Vice President John Dramani Mahama’s call on Ghanaians
to give President Mills and the NDC a Second Four year Term
We are here today to report to you that the people of Ghana are fed up in all parts of the country and will not at all vote for President Mills in his second term bid. Simply put, President Mills does not deserve a second term. A second term is earned, not given on a silver platter.
We want to tell Vice President Mahama and his NDC friends that a second presidential term is not a right. It is earned. President Mills and his team cannot and will not get a second term of office because they have not earned it. Ghana and Ghanaians cannot afford to suffer four more years of disappointment, vindictiveness, footsoldierism under a weak and an unseen President.
This President has failed to earn another term. The People cannot waste four more years under a Mills administration; a Government made up of failed promises, hypocrisy, administrative incompetence, corruption and economic hardship which stare most Ghanaians squarely in the face.
Nobody doubts the God-fearing nature of President Mills. It is human failure on the part of his administration that has made living standards suffer greatly, worsened economic conditions and made possible mass failures in education. The Youth want jobs not the juju politics that creates 1.6 million phantom jobs and turns Sheep into Cow, sod cutting packaged into an action year and judgement debts paid out gargantually without recourse to laid down procedures. Mills has failed to produce a plan to eliminate corruption, old boyism, cronyism, and winner takes all from our national politics. There can be no scape goat than the incumbent Mills.
The Woyometrics that this our fragile economy has gone through is never ending; for the first time in the economic life of this country the highest amount of money ever paid to any individual has taken place without recourse to the people and reportedly without heeding to the President’s own call for non-payment, and under very questionable circumstances. Yet we watch helplessly whilst the cover up is being crafted in our very eyes.
Who is in charge of the public purse and the sole custodian of the consolidated fund? Where are we with the right to information bill so that by law we could get the much needed information so as to recover our monies? What accounts for the lack of recovery will on the part of the President? Ghanaians are discerning people and we have been watching for a very long time whether things would get better with judgement debt pay outs. But how can things get better when Mills has refused to go to the people to live with them and to seek their views on these payments.
At long last Election 2012 is just around the corner some 20 weeks away, and Mills and his team sit in air-conditioned offices in the capital and believe that the people will vote for them on a flimsy excuse that all predecessors had eight years - “tofiakwa”, how can it happen? Mills came to power promising to deal with corruption based on just newspaper reports, provide the much needed jobs for the teeming youth country wide, carry out development as never before in this country. We believed that he was coming to take Ghana to the next level, but what do we have? A non-existent better Ghana agenda which we cannot experience. President Mills, with all his experience as vice president for four years and with his varied experience in opposition for a good eight years has disappointed mother Ghana?
As a supposed democratic socialist by ideology, President Mills has sat by for all the pro-poor policies of the previous administration to collapse or near extinction. Why? What has happened to the school feeding program, National Health Insurance and your one time premium, national identification program which would have sanitised our national identity base and allowed for the effective use of a cashless economy has been thrown overboard.

President Mills has forgotten the interests of the majority of Ghanaians and has adopted a closed door policy. Even the founder of his own party and his political Godfather has not escaped this treatment. It appears he does not listen to anyone. He has woefully failed to win economic independence from the Bretton Woods institutions.
Women were promised 40% representation at all levels of government and they were made to believe that they would stand side by side with the men in his administration. Today where are the women in his administration? Today women rights are no longer natural rights. How come? Gender tokenism for political expediency is what Mills has practised. He has failed to stop the root cause of discrimination against women from childhood. Children roam the streets of the suburbs of our towns when they should be in school. Currently about 700,000 children who should be in kindergarten are not there. Why? The youth of this country are always falling victim to social activities which are harmful such as drug- abuse, alcoholism, per-marital sex which is seriously taking a toll on a better future for them. The aged who have also contributed their quota in building this country have been left to their fate. We believe that as a leader the interest of the citizenry must be of the utmost concern of the President. But that has not happened under his administration.
Investments in education are not well ordered and prioritised so as to liberate the total population from poverty. Quality education hit all-time low and in 2010 with 46% of students presented for the Basic School Exams failing, subsequently in 2011, 54% of the students presented for the same exams failed. So what has happened to our education as nobody wants to say a word about this problem. President Mills as usual is silent. There is seriously lack of space in our secondary schools because about 50% of those who gain entry in the SHS are unable to be housed and the value we have placed on vocational and technical education has made them a non-attractive area for these children. What harm do we want to do to ourselves as a nation? The state of the Public school system is nothing to write home about, the welfare and working conditions of Teachers are appalling and do not in any way measure up to their so-called “Nation Builder” accolade.
It is nerve-racking to note that, President Mills who has been educated at public expense, and who has lived and travelled to many advanced countries and has witnessed how these societies have ordered their priorities and invested heavily in their public educational system to make it successful, sits on the fence whilst our education suffers.
Taiwan with no natural resources has the 4th largest financial reserves in the World. Why? Because instead of mining the ground for whatever minerals that come up, Taiwan mines and refines its 23 million population as their mineral resources: That is to say they tap and nurture the talents, intelligence and energy of the total population of Taiwan, both men and women to become what they are today.
In America about 47 million students are found in the public school as against only 5 million in private schools; likewise in the U.K where about 94% of school going children are in the public schools. In Ghana, the reverse is rather true for our education, why? We need to move away from curbing basic numeracy and literacy and build at least a minimum knowledge based medium level manpower that should end up in immediate employment or be relevant raw material for our tertiary schools and we cannot achieve this with a weak public education system.
The Health sector is nothing to write home about. The National Health Insurance Scheme is severely pressured and it is near collapse. Provision of health infrastructure is still haphazard, emergency care is nothing to talk about, because most of the accidents on our roads could be recovered if we had a prompt emergency care system in place. Malaria, Cholera, Guinea Worm infections still live with us 55 years after independence. Why? A better and cleaner environment is what we deserve as a nation.
The management of the energy sector has been below average, we lack abundant and cheap supply of energy to our private sector which is supposed to be the engine of growth of our economy, and mechanised agriculture needs fuel to work. ICT and any other form of advanced technology depend on sustained and reliable electricity and other energy sources. Private sector needs appropriately cost effective fuel and power to be profitable. The internet revolution cannot be sustained on the back of abundant cost effective reliable energy. The media cannot disseminate information effectively without power, yet the management of the Tema Oil Refinery (TOR), Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC) and the recent Oil Discovery is nothing to write home about especially in our efforts to stop the ’Dum Sor’ ‘Dum Sor’ supply of electricity which is so erratic and has been a contributory factor to the slow economic activity experienced by the nation.
Oil revenues from the large reserves has been contaminated with waste and corruption and sharing of the revenue fairly among communities and the various sectors have not been forthcoming; there is no long term plan to grow the oil sector and its many allied industries without ignoring the non-oil sector. Public confidence in the oil find and its related fortunes for transformational development is greatly shaken.
Mills started by saying that every Ghanaian must have a home. He turned to Koreans in the aborted STX deal for 30,000 houses for the security agencies and then to 500 houses for our teachers and yet nothing has happened. There remains a deficit of 1.5 million houses. Why hasn’t Mills solved the housing problem? How can we as a nation use the deficit in the housing sector to create the much needed employment in the construction sector and the promotion of a local building materials industry in the sub region?
The vast majority of our youth wake up in the morning with nothing to look forward to. Our active population go about in the streets with nothing better for them. A country touted as the same size as Britain and endowed with natural resources, enviably touted as the second largest producer of gold, the second largest producer of Cocoa in the World, the second best exporter of wood and wood products and the largest Timber Producer in Africa cannot provide well-paying jobs that would sustain their individual level pocket prosperity? Why?
The Mills administration with this entire stable political environment has failed to think outside the box so as to initiate conscious policies to order the economy to produce the much need jobs. Mills has failed to use the state’s purchasing power to ensure that we maximise the potential of local industries in all areas: agriculture, technology and consumer goods etc., and has failed to grow local businesses by not putting Ghanaians first in the execution of projects.
Impunity and corruption thrives in an environment like ours where governance is weak. Mills has not led by example with the payment of tax and declaration of assets. He has not been modest in government and he is not cutting our coat according to our social and economic cloth. His ministers flout his instructions on several occasions, there is disrespect for laid down procedures from tender to procurement, non-enforcement of control principles, abuse of ministerial powers, slipshod supervision, improper payments and poor accounting system. Young members of Government who should be sober and reflective so that they can have the necessary goodwill to go about their work and contribute their quota can only be seen busying themselves on political discussion programs. Instead of making use of the opportunity to be where they are, they rather waste precious time which should be used to solve the many problems that confront us as a people. Why?
We cannot short-change the demands of Ghanaians for better and exemplary, accountable, dependable, truthful, law abiding, fair, all embracing Presidency with the current status quo. We must replace politics of the belly, politics of cronyism and state sponsored corruption with politics of practical transparency and accountability. We need a President that would be firm and caring and who has the capabilities and competencies to create the needed anti-corruption environment that would replace the current Mills’ administration. We need a government that would create same access opportunities, ownership and employment and the provision of basic social infrastructure whilst using the natural resources modestly and kindly. Mills has failed to order our priorities so as to save us from corruption, bad leadership, bad education, poor health delivery and lack of jobs that is why we call for his total rejection in December.
We are all fed up with the blame game theories; we are fed up with the tit for tat politics, name calling, leg pulling, lack of opportunity and the lack of transformation of our society in all these years of democracy. We are tired of hearing empty promises that have no basis to be made, and surely we are tired of the God fearing Mills to bring the Economic Grace we have been expecting. We have to be reflective of our future, tread cautiously and demonstrate progressive defiance as we go to the polls in December so that we can elect the best suited person with the proven qualities and who has demonstrated selfless public service and would keep the promises of the population intact so as to make people realise their expectations.
We should replace Mills with a leader who will not be Partisan at all and would include all in order to build consensus on how to monitor, implement and do things differently with a sense of urgency so that what needs to be done today is not left to wait until tomorrow.
The amount of funds that has come to this administration is unmatched. Loans, Grants and benefits under HIPC and MCA, and state generated revenue are gargantuan-ly unmatched and yet there is very little to show for it. With inflation supposedly low, food prices are rising and the value of the cedi is crimpling in the face of other currencies yet Mills is waiting for manner from Heaven to feed us with. It is only hard work, discipline, openness that would liberate this country from economic prison which it has been kept.
The best practise worldwide is for the electorate to apply the principle of critical citizenship so that whatever our disappointments are, we would have the opportunity to dissolve the trust reposed in Mills through peaceful means. Critical citizenship acknowledges the necessity of Governments and insists that it is the quality not the quantity should determine political support. Therefore with the enormous task left undone across the country, the level of deprivation, poverty and inhumane conditions across the country and the contrasting political talk and propaganda by those who sit in air conditioned offices and wish to take credit for work they have not done they should be Wide Awake because the ides of December stares them in the face.
The people are tired of poverty in all its forms-disease infected water they drink, dangerous roads, and low quality of education, poor housing, preventable diseases and very, very high unemployment; from Aflao, Asamankese, Biriwa, Bamboi, Nyanyano, Gizaa, Asankare, Foase, Moree, Lawra, Wenchi, Wa, Tumu, Bawku, Mion, Hemang, Shama, Tolon, and Zabzugu ‘there is no better Ghana Agenda’.
We have voted in 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004, 2008 and the outcomes have not transformed our society perhaps we did not apply the principle of critical citizenship or we were too ideological, traditional, dogmatic and considered quantity instead of quality that is why given the chance in 2012 we would be pragmatic and scientific so as to get the desired effect after 2012 and beyond.
It is clear the obvious choice for Ghanaians particularly the youth and women are the PPP and Dr. Papa Kwesi Nduom.