body-container-line-1
14.04.2014 Feature Article

'Ghana Is Sick, Sick'

By Kwasi Ansu-KyeremehBy Kwasi Ansu-Kyeremeh
14.04.2014 LISTEN

A disenchanted compatriot spoke them on an Oseikrom radio station one Friday afternoon. The livid compatriot was reacting to the demolition of structures approved to be constructed by legitimate state institutions. For each 'sick' yell, I could readily think scores of sicknesses.

His beef was how easily people who are supposed to grow entrepreneurial capacity using public clout would rather frustrate enterprising compatriots.

He complained about spending public money to woo foreign investment while using the same apparatuses to destroy local investment. So much for consume made in Ghana crusade!

The taxi driver kept expressing shock in my state of numbness listening to Odike on Antoa. On and on he went detailing prescribed steps he had taken to lawfully secure land and permit to operate his vehicle licensing business. During a courtesy call, the demolisher of his structures had actually given verbal approval to the project.

Rounding up, he recounted how the demolition had compelled him, a want-to-be-president personality, to invoke the powers of a deity to destroy he who had caused a bulldozer to mow down his property.

I don't want to insinuate how Odike came by the contract. In my relatively closed mind, there is enabling corruption (which still is not right although some extenuating circumstances may be argued for it). And there is disenabling corruption, which is a double whammy because one sins for obtaining a contract corruptibly just as it is sin not to execute the contract or execute it below standards, thus without value for money.

The corruption-sick may not be that easily manifest. It is clear, though, that in all that which happened, power was exercised corruptly. And as congress power which is often seen by those who exercise it as absolute, it corrupted absolutely leading to the demolition. If that were not so, no power would have illegally dared bulldoze structures that had been legitimately constructed.

Another sickness was the lack of coordination by the coordinator of security support for demolition.

Congress' favourite REGSEC expected to be about coordinating security at one point in an administrative region failed.

If I heard right and I think I did, the regional police command declined for lack of sufficient reasons to partake in the demolition exercise. That notwithstanding, the demolisher was still able to secure military cooperation. That was a breakdown in institutional effectiveness of coordination.

Flashback to the one supposed to protect us all tearing down the security gate under construction at the University of Ghana when part of his congress government was in the process of sorting out the issue with the University authorities.

A related sickness is impunity. Demolition power was exercised capriciously in the belief that no one would challenge or dare contradict it.

Everywhere you go in this motherland since January 7, 2009, power has been exercised with impunity. DCEs have become experts in carving out fiefdoms.

A DCE has no 'co-equal.' If you dare say tweaa, a DCE will teach you that you exist in his fiefdom at his mercy. Meanwhile, a DCE has no mercy to be merciful.

Arrogance, it is yet another congress affliction. Day in, day out, they visit it upon my compatriots.

Congress presidents, ministers and chief executives show everyday that they do not care about the harm that they create which affects motherland.

If not pure arrogance, no compatriot with authority will dare steal a Merchant Bank carrying it on his shoulders in brought daylight to go and sell it to defray a brother's indebtedness to that same bank.

That is arrogating to yourself powers you dare not have and fearing no consequences because you know there will be none that will be unfavourable to you.

Corruption, impunity and arrogance, they breed each other and feed into each other. If you are of the congress stock, you will not know that; or you will choose not to know that.

But that is what they are; congress of arrogance, impunity and corruption.

All rivers in the motherland, the water of which sustained life of flora and fauna are deities by those who believe they are together a source of life.

Without water, there is hardly life. As a source of life, water could equally take away life; thus life-threatening curses are invoked in the name of rivers. In it is the root of the Antoa curse.

Antoa curse isn't, however, a motherland malaise. In the days when it worked, there was less corruption, impunity and arrogance. Let modernism deal with that otherwise we are assured a return to cursing as motherland sickness.

Everything congress administers (loans, oil money disappearance, judgment debt, selling bank, is cursed.

Resorting to cursing to secure justice would mean the motherland is indeed cursed under congress until 2016.

By Kwasi Ansu-Kyeremeh

More from this author (189)

More

body-container-line