Mills 'unprecedented' success tells much about why he has failed

President John Evans Atta Mills

Work out this scenario. One political party says it is allocating GH¢700 million of state resources this year to pay for judgment debts that no one in this country is aware of, after blowing GH¢640 million on very dubious judgment debts that ended in the pockets of cronies.

Another promise is that the party would make secondary education free, by allocating about GH¢150 million annually to ensure that our kids are educated at the expense of the state. Which of the two political edifices should the people trust?

The beauty of democracy is that the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC), the party of President John Evans Atta Mills, has been mocking the free education concept proposed by Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, flagbearer of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), while blowing millions of Ghana cedis on judgment debts that those proposing the payments may themselves, be unaware of.

That this nation is being short-changed by people, who have no clue of how to solve the problems of state, is without question. Instead of apologising for mismanaging state resources, President John Evans Atta Mills is annoying every inhabitant at the centre of the earth. By claiming that the performance of his administration in moving this society forward is unprecedented, Prof. Mills might be living in cloud cuckoo land.

I am afraid the former law lecturer is nearing the stage of the king who appeared in public without clothes. Appropriately, Dr. Paa Kwesi Nduom suggested in a programme with Kesben FM in Kumasi that the Head of State did not know what he was talking about.

Read the lips of moustached Kwesi Nduom: 'You see, when people start talking like that, some of us get worried, because it fuels speculations that politicians only say things to cajole people, otherwise, how can you say that you have made 'unprecedented' achievements that is not so.'

I was beginning to work myself into a frenzy, annoyed by the sheer attempt to throw dust into our eyes, when I decided to read the front page news item once more. It was then that I got a fair idea about the permutations that could have influenced that pronouncement from one of the non-performing assets, who happens to lead society.

In the first place, the story appeared in the Daily Graphic, the leading newspaper in the country, fast establishing itself as the official mouthpiece of this administration. The second mitigating factor is that President Mills was addressing presidential media men and women, carefully assembled to report on Government House from spectacles heavily doused with the image of the ruling class, and put under the tutelage of Koku Anykidoho, Director of Communications at the Castle, who is virtually calling all the shots.

In simple language, the President might have been influenced by the friendly forces around him, and which might have goaded him on to speak the way he did.

'We have done extremely well in all sectors of the economy. We are, therefore, going to have the renewal of our mandate,' said the President, as quoted in yesterday's issue of the Daily Graphic. 'Our Better Ghana agenda is on course. We have chronicled what we have achieved over the years. It is unprecedented.'

According to the Daily Graphic, the President mentioned single digit inflation, massive infrastructural development, and reduction in poverty, among other things.

For a moment I felt dazed. How could the President say poverty has been reduced, when in the three years that he has presided over the affairs of state, more than 600,000 unemployable youth have been dumped on this nation?  In the three years that Mills has occupied the Castle, considerably more than half of candidates who sat the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) have failed to gain entrance into the Senior High School.

Before the advent of this regime, the BECE had a pass rate of at least 62 percent. I was really struggling to understand the former law lecturer's concept of 'unprecedented,' and decided to consult the dictionary, in case the meaning was not what I had known all along.

The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English defines unprecedented thus: 'Having no precedent; unparalleled, novel.' In effect, the President of the Republic of Ghana is telling his fellow countrymen that this administration, that has doled out over GH¢640 million of our little resources in judgment debts under very dubious circumstances, believes it has done better than any regime, since colonialism.

According to President Atta Mills, this non-performing administration that has allowed party agents to walk from the classroom into ministerial appointments, in the process of which some of them have built mansions, using their acidic tongues to insult anybody who cares to straighten their paths, has done far better than Sir Gordon Guggisberg, Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, Kofi Abrefa Busia, Dr. Hilla Limann, Jerry John Rawlings and all the military adventurers who  occupied the Castle with their cross belts at one point in time.

We are told that one of the major indices used by the President to tell his success story is inflation, which still remains in single digit. For me, as a national, the issue of inflation calls for a thorough investigation. Inflation in Ghana is not, and cannot be in single digit.

Not too long ago, I engaged my namesake Ebo Duncan, a Director at the Ghana Statistical Service, who is in charge of working out inflation figures for the Republic of Ghana. What he told me must be food for thought for all nationals of this Republic.

According to Mr. Duncan, the Statistical Service chooses certain shops throughout the country, where prices of goods are used in working out the indices on inflation. In the words of the man working out inflation for all of us, when foot workers of the Statistical Service get to any of the designated shops, and for any reason, that shop is closed for that day, all goods whose price lists should have featured in the exercise are zero-rated.

In other words, those goods are given for free, in the diction of the Statistical Service. For me, as a Ghanaian, this means of working out the indices could be the reason why inflation is still ranked in single digit at a time prices of goods and services are rising in double, triple and sometimes quadruple figures.

Ghanaians have their own means of working out the rise in the cost of goods and services. When the same size of a ball of kenkey that sold for GH¢0.20 before Mills took over the reigns of government is being offered GH¢0.50, GH¢0.70 and even GH¢1.00, the average person needs no President to tell him or her that the cost of living is stagnant.

Cement, for instance, was being sold for GH¢8 at the time ex-President John Agyekum Kufuor exited power. At the moment, it takes GH¢18 to buy the same bag of cement. As a matter of fact, not even the price of salt, the commonest commodity on the market, could claim to have remained a single digit inflation.

I am submitting that the inflation figures being bandied about have no semblance to the reality on the ground. I am of the opinion that the Ghana Statistical Service is fiddling with the figures. If this administration cares about finding out the truth, it should appoint an investigation team to go into how inflation is calculated in this country. I believe inflation figures churned out from the Office of the Government Statistician are fraudulent and, therefore, criminal.

When the President talks of infrastructure development, he reminds me of the King without clothes. When he appeared in public, the king was stark naked. All the same, the sycophants around him convinced the monarch that he was wearing the best clothes that had ever been manufactured.

One interesting thing about this President is that anytime Prof. Mills comes public to condemn politics of insult for instance, men and women, owing their positions to the professor's presence at Government House, rather go on the offensive, insulting their political opponents the more.  Just before President Mills went to the United States, his Communications Director went haywire describing officers of the Friends of Nana Konadu Agyeman Rawlings in language I am constrained to repeat here.

Instead of reprimanding him, the President of the Republic made Koku Anyidoho a key member of his entourage.

When the Economic and Organised Crime Office published officially that the Head of State of this Republic, who virtually shed crocodile tears at his meeting with selected editors and senior journalists over the Woyome scandal, did not only know about the doling out of GH¢51 million to his friend and political ally, but had earlier asked that the payment be stopped on two occasions, my level of appreciation for the occupant of Government House dropped.

I am afraid this President has not demonstrated to me, and this society generally, that sincerity is one of his strongest attributes.