Sanitary Pad Politics

President John Mahama

Enter sanitary pad politics. Ghanaians yesterday woke up to a stunning news story about how government intends earmarking a portion of an education enhancement loan for the provision of sanitary pads for schoolgirls.

The NDC government has doubtlessly provided for Ghanaians an interesting means of measuring how wrongly or rightly they manage priorities.

By this intention, the embattled National Democratic Congress (NDC) government, which is still smarting from a biting and debilitating fuel shortage and a failed soccer showing in Brazil, has opened a new frontier in a useless bid to win the minds of disgruntled Ghanaians.

The issue of government's newfound romance with hygiene for adolescent girls is amazing. This is happening when parents are scratching their heads over how to cope with the escalating prices of

life-sustaining commodities alongside unbearable school fees in the face of useless national health insurance.

If only the amount earmarked for the short-term provision of sanitary pads could be directed toward cushioning the cost of fees and school-related expenses, perhaps parents could sing Halleluiah!

The arguments being advanced by government appointees who must have a stake in the arrangement for sanitary pads are so spurious that we are at a loss over why misplacement of priorities continues to be a feature of those at the helm.

They are behaving as though such confidential matters as the acquisition of sanitary pads, are now out of the reach of schoolgirls and therefore prompting many to drop out of schools.

If they claim to have undertaken a research along such lines, we would be hard-pressed not to turn our back on the outcome. When would this government be a little bit serious with the governance of this country?

The sanitary pad issue is competing favourably with the contempt with which two ministers carelessly treated very serious concerns raised by a group of Ghanaians when they marched to the Flagstaff House on a rainy day.

The ministers - Hannah Tetteh and Felix Kwakye Ofosu - by their remarks, taunted Ghanaians.

It would appear that the executive is unable to gauge the mood of Ghanaians at this time of the country's life when things are falling apart with such rapidity, and would risk such infantile reaction to very serious issues as in the case of a demonstration against bad governance and its effects.

Last Tuesday's demonstration - the first of its kind in Ghana's post-independence history - had shaken the executive so much that the best reaction was the taunting by the aforementioned duo.

It is amazing that while the President - their boss -   could not afford their kind of reaction, preferring an 'I would listen to all' approach, they chose the abrasive path. They met their march from the scathing responses from a cross-section of incensed Ghanaians. Some of the reactions were so obscene that the radio stations were unable to air them.

We just wonder what the likes of Hannah Tetteh and Felix Kwakye Ofosu will have to say about a subtle manoeuvre to dip sticky government's hands into a loan through a crazy project of supplying sanitary pads. Ingenuity at its best by a bunch of politicians who dread demonstrations!

God save us!