Our Leaders Lack Imagination And Common Sense

Finally, the Chinese have mustered the guts to tell the Mahama-led National Democratic Congress (NDC) what most Ghanaians have been telling it all along. The recent flat refusal by Beijing to serve as a servile and an unquestioning underwriter of Mr. Mahama’s profligate propaganda projects, ought to serve as a vital lesson for all future Ghanaian governments (See “Ghana’s Debt Burden None of China’s Business – Franklin Cudjoe” Citifmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 7/6/15). We understand that government-finance officials in Beijing recently wrote to the GYEEDA squatters at the Flagstaff House that they cannot support the wasteful policies of the Mahama government; and that the “Ganja” Boy had better start looking elsewhere for economic salvation.

In the wake of the preceding flat rejection, Mr. Franklin Cudjoe of the IMANI-Ghana think-tank was reported to have sharply retorted that it was not the business of the Beijing government to remind its Accra counterpart about the fact that the latter seemed to be recklessly borrowing and spending far more than it could afford. In the opinion of Mr. Cudjoe, an otherwise forward-looking Ghanaian economist, the subject of heavy indebtedness on the part of the Mahama-led National Democratic Congress is the exclusive preserve of Ghanaian citizens.

Well, I have a problem with this trend of ratiocination, or logical reasoning, because even as Mr. Cudjoe is well aware of this himself, President Mahama has categorically demonstrated, with the dogged pursuit of his “Yenntie Obiara” economic policy, that he and his cabinet appointees of brazen robber-barons do not take marching orders from anybody but themselves. And so clearly, it cannot be aptly said that ours is a responsible government that is willing to heed the constructive admonishment of even those who afforded its operatives the mandate to manage the affairs of the people.

And so on the preceding score also, it is significant to remind Mr. Cudjoe that not too long ago, he was himself rudely bumped off a fiscal-discipline policing committee that President Mahama had established with the express and well-meaning purpose of reining in the reckless spending of public money by party hirelings in the civil service sector. The name of the committee, as I faintly recall, presently, sounded something like the Ho Accord or some such ambitious designation. Mr. Cudjoe shortly found himself ostracized by those who staunchly believed that they had a proprietary right over the NDC-led government, and also that they had peremptory ownership of the party’s fiscal-policy agenda. In fact, one such party-machine operative even suggested that Mr. Cudjoe was inimically advocating the inadvisable pursuance of policies that were likely to return the NDC to the dry margins political opposition. Mr. Cudjoe had mildly suggested that significant blubber be trimmed off the public payroll by getting rid of ghost names as well as downsizing both the public and civil service.

Indeed, until the latest rebuff by the Chinese government, the National Democratic Congress’ key operatives had become so hopelessly and embarrassingly dependent on Beijing that even just last year, the General-Secretary of the party, the cross-dressing Mr. Johnson Asiedu-Nketia, undertook a widely publicized working tour of the world’s second-largest country, with the objective of having Chinese ideologues and bureaucrats establish a college in Ghana for the “red-training” of NDC apparatchiks. Now that their Chinese ideological role models have told the Moscow-educated President Mahama like it is, as it were, it remains to be seen what alternative policy direction and initiative these stomach-oriented faux-revolutionaries intend to pursue. As of this writing, President Mahama was reported to be on a hat-in-hand official visit to Italy.

Then also, I wanted to ask, at least in passing, why Mr. Cudjoe has not similarly told off the dog-leashing operatives of the IMF and the World Bank. I am, of course being purely rhetorical here.