On Presidential Incompetence, Gaffes And Insults

Ghana Election 2016 is bound to be a very interesting one. In one corner we have the main opposition that appears to derive immense macabre pleasure from inflicting mortal wounds on itself. By the look of things, the New Patriotic Party (NPP) seems to care less about next year’s election than in members inflicting the maximum wounds on each other.

Hardly, a day passes without members threatening each other with hellfire plus brimstone and more. It is doubtful if the NPP will regain enough sanity to successfully prosecute next year’s elections. Leaders of the small parties appear to have such gargantuan ego problem they are unable to put aside to form a united Third Force to force out the NDC/NPP sides of the same bad coin. Let us not waste time on them here.

In the other corner we have a clueless, totally visionless and yes, absolutely incompetent, government that is adrift with apparently no direction whatever.

Oh, no, we detest and abhor personal insult in this column. Readers will attest that we do our best to shy away from it.

Let the dictionary help us to show that we did not insult anyone by describing a government that received the mandate of Ghanaians, abused it and turned the governance of the nation to the IMF, as incompetent.

Mrs. Dictionary, please come to our aid: “Com-pe-tence [kómpət'nss] - the ability to do something well.”

That is it, folks. Very simple.
Can we in all honesty describe a government that saddled the country with over US$90billion in debt with little to show for it as doing something well? Can a government that tacitly admitted failure in managing the national economy by turning to the IMF be called competent? Can we call a government with three ministers in MOFA competent when the country continue to spend about US$500 million on food imports? Can we describe as competent an administration that preside over the vast sickening corruption we witness under this government?

These are the elementary questions the president should have asked himself before he started to throw insults around.

No, Mr. President we did not set out to insult you, or anyone for that matter. In criticizing your administration’s glaring, sorry we have to use that word, incompetence, again, we have a moral and patriotic right and obligation to roundly criticize you.

It is quite simple, we did not beg you or anyone to come and lead us. People come to us and made fanciful noises during election campaigns. We voted for them, fulfilling what is supposed to be our part of the bargain. For anyone to receive our mandate, failed to keep his promises and expect us to sing his praises is asking for too much, even from pliant, docile citizens like us.

Honestly, given the grinding hardship we face daily in this republic, incompetence is the mildest adjective we could use. We are being deliberately nice and decent because we still wish our misrulers well and hope that they will read what we write, hear what we say and try to effect the necessary changes that will help to solve some (no one ask that they solve all) the problems besetting the country.

And what are some of these problems? Let us stick with just three that we considered very basic to life: food, electricity and water?

In the sphere of food production and availability, to say that the current administration has handled the food situation in the country incompetently is to be guilty of inadequate vocabulary. We have three ministers in the ministry of agriculture, yet our president keep on bemoaning the high cost of food import. Even ordinary market women bemoan the fact that our tomatoes now come from semi-arid Burkina Faso while our Kotomre is now imported from La Cote dÍvoire. Mr. President, your minister for health should be able to tell you how our people today suffer from myriads of debilitating illnesses caused by consuming food saturated with unwholesome chemicals.

For fear of courting further presidential displeasure cum insults, we dare not ask what our president tasked his three ministers to accomplish when he appointed them. We know that our traditional staple food (maize and cassava) are very easy to grow foodstuffs. Even our new staple (Rice) is grown easily all over Asia.

Why have our president not ensure that he put food on our table at affordable cost? Do we say that he does not care, or that he simply don’t have a plan or that he is simply, oh, that word again, incompetent?

Ghana has more rivers than almost all her immediate neighbours. Despite the climate change, we still get adequate rainfall. Yet, we still cannot get enough water for our domestic use!

Do we not have the right to ask our president whether or not he has any plan to ensure that every Ghanaian have access to potable water? It baffles the mind greatly just thinking about what goes through our leader’s mind as he sits in his expensive Jeep (bought with borrowed IMF loan, let us repeat here) and tool around town in his long convoy and see ordinary Ghanaians with Kufuor gallons on their heads looking all over town for water. Since the provision of water is considered routine in many countries, we can only assume that Mr. President just do not care enough when he sees his compatriots suffer in great sufferation (to borrow that lovely Rastafarian expression) in order to get ordinary water.

The least we say about electricity the better. On his campaign train, Mr. President waxed lyrical as he promised Ghanaians that he will solve our electricity woes within one year. Then, he joined us to denounce the then president and bemoaned our lack of electricity. He took side with us to condemn his predecessor’s inability to give us adequate electricity.

That was then; now is now.
Today, Mr. President is moved to anger when we ask him to deliver on his promise to provide us with electricity. Now, it is throw big insult around time.

We have lost count on how many times he has changed gears and broken what we naively considered a solemn promise.

To cover up what can only be described by, yes, incompetence, Mr. President layered one more ministry over our bloated bureaucracy and vowed to end Dumsor. The new Minister for Energy put his neck on the block and swore to resign if he did not end the power shortages by year’s end. Yesterday, he was in the news singing a new tune. He said that what he promised was the end of load-shedding and not Dumsor.

Gosh!
He is still at his post and Mr. President has not thought it necessary to call him to account.

It is comical to watch the videos government propaganda people produced to market the president for the 2016 Elections. So, HE is transforming Ghana by building roads and schools.

Wow!
There is just one small reason why we are not so thrilled: it does not require much brainpower to take IMF loans to pay Chinese and Brazilian contractor to build roads and schools.

We lambasted a former president when his staff also produced a video showing him opening toilets, school canteens etc etc.

The reason is that such mundane tasks are better left for lower-level hirelings. Where on earth does a president find the time go and be commissioning public toilets? Our ambitions should be made of sterner stuffs. Our presidents should have big, even vast ambitions, where issues such like school buildings, toilets and stuffs shall find no place.

The same president travelled out all the way to a General Assembly of the United where he beat chest and touted the provision of school uniforms as high achievements.

Today, we have a president that take huge pride in donning hard hats to go and commission roads Brazilians and Chinese are building with borrowed money.

Gosh! The very idea that his staff thought so lowly of Mr. President to saddle him with mundane task spoke volume about the, yes again, incompetence, of the current administration. Where does the president that keep hopping from tractor to caterpillar find the time to sit down and dream the big dreams that will transform the country?

We will find something salutary and celebratory when the president of Ghana is inspecting projects designed, funded and built by Ghanaians.

What would the foreign workers think of us when they see our Chief Executive mixing it up with them grinning like a Sweepstake winners?

PS: We said several times in this column that it is time that our rulers borrow from our tradition and learn to speak through Okyeame.

It gives no one any pleasure to bandy insults with the president of his country. But it helps no one to continue to live in 18^th century due to the incompetence of those that foisted themselves on us. We cannot keep on accepting insults from those that make us the world’s laughing stock by their sheer incompetence and inability to provision us with ordinary life’s basics.

Those that spent three years junketing around the world to canvass for foreign investors when they have not safeguard the home front have no business pouring invective on us when we point their inadequacies and incompetence out.

Leaders of countries that produce and sell almost all mineral known to nature and failed to provide food, water and electricity for citizens have no business getting angry when citizens criticize their ineptitude.