Incompetence Par Excellence

In retrogressing order, we have been sliding backwards from mediocrity into incompetence par excellence with our government machinery over the last eighteen months or so.

Ministers cannot answer simple questions posed in Parliament. And documents involving borrowing that mortgages our chicken counting before hatched-egg oil cannot be properly prepared.

Somehow, the reasons are not hard to find. If Ministers are choosing to spend their time on radio and television to argue over the unarguable, they will not have time to perform their ministerial tasks.

My compatriots, I challenge all of you to pick pen and paper and draw a table with four columns.

If you are techno-adept, Microsoft Word has graphics command that will produce one for you in seconds.

In column one of the table will be names of all ministers, substantive, deputising and of, not for, state.

Column two will capture the number of appearances on radio and/or television programmes. Column three will tally Parliamentary questions answered to the satisfaction of the honoured ones and the rest of us. And the last column will be dedicated to progress in the discharge of that ministry's assigned responsibilities.

Only one week of data captured with the table will be enough to support a hypothesis that ministers are likely to be propagating in the media, with resultant little or no mandatory tasks accomplished.  

A case in point is the ministry that is supposed to help my compatriots who, because they are not like the daughter of woman who has roof over her head but still wants a better roof over her and her husband's and children's heads, find roofs over their head; to wit the STX deal.

Oh, daughter of woman; she who used to be obeyed, you are telling my compatriots and I that female hens have coops and female foxes have holes, but you daughter of woman, even though you have mum's roof over your head in addition to roofs at Atimpoku, Tefle and just next door Ajiriganor, still want more roof. Look at you. You didn't take care of the roof my compatriots and I, including those who have no roofs over their head, sweated to put over your head, and your husband's head and the heads of your Irish Ivy league trained children. It is all ashes.   

The foul-mouthed minister's assistant spends her time doing what she knows best and that for which she did so well to qualify her to be appointed to assist a minister.

She never would have read the STX document that was a disaster in Parliament. Alternatively, she did not understand a word of it if she did read, just like her propaganda equivalent at the Ministry of Finance.

Meanwhile, her minister, busy strategising with the presidential ambitioned presidential next for a presidential campaign in raising presidential campaign funds through the STX deal, was so busy presidential strategising.

Consequently, he became entirely bereft of his long-acquired experience in Parliament to embarrass himself by presenting the STX presidential campaign arsenal, to his not-long-ago honoured colleagues, without having time to read through for parliamentary requirements of that kind of document.   

My compatriots in the security services, especially the military, may want to ask the STXers who are pushing the STX deal so hard ostensibly in the interest of the military, why they are behaving in that way.

Our military have a right to know because from a May uprising to a June coup and a December coup, the congressmen and women have ridden on their backs, using their names in vain, to build mansions and secure comfort for themselves.

As for me, and many, many compatriots' and many, many, many Africans and Africanists the world over, Kwame Nkrumah's son, I haven't the faintest idea how he found himself among that group born by who born dog the universally acclaimed apostle of ingratitude.

Osagyefo unreservedly condemned coup d'états. And this, his son, was a son who was deprived of fatherly love, care and guidance by a coup. How this son will embrace a professional coup maker and fight for his cause of disrespect, know-all and ingratitude is beyond my comprehension.

Even now that he has been burnt by their retribution, excluded as a scapegoat, he still doesn't seem to get it; that the cause he claims to be struggling to promote is a standard seven, team B, no standard cause.

It is the cause of cost-rising with no progress. It is a snail-mail cause which specialises in propagating lies such as 1.6 million phantom jobs for which they turn round to feign ghost names so my minimum wage NYEP compatriots cannot be paid.

They seem to have forgotten that today's footsoldier NYEP recruits, who have been substituted through the elimination of diligent and industrious Kufuor recruits, are yesterday's mobisquad and cadres who in those dark days, just turned up at the end of each month to collect wages from the consolidated fund for no work done.

Osagyefo's son, definitely too young to know what was going on when his father was chased out by some rascals led by one Kotoka, must have learned by now that there was a youth policy that mobilized through a progressive primary one to university free education system and a Young Pioneer Movement that inculcated Africanness and patriotism into the youth.

The youth were trained in work skills in institutions such as Kwame Nkrumah Institute of Pioneering Youth and provided quick jobs in the Builders/Workers Brigade, State Farms, Future farmers and rapid industrialsation including rural industry employment avenues.  

I wish he could be convinced to listen to big sister who seems more to be trying to rekindle daddy's big dream of a Black Star Africa that shines and shimmers within the comity of nations.

In it all, the other half of the national disruptive congress is peeved, very peeved.

Their doctor-title crazy unofficial spokesperson just came short of telling their in-charge that you are as incompetent as the incompetent ministers you appoint.

By Kwasi Ansu-Kyeremeh