WHAT ABOUT A BLACK BOOK ON CORRUPTION?

Last week, President John Dramani Mahama launched a Green Book that he and members of his NDC government said contained achievements of the government from 2009 to date. I honestly will not waste valuable time to dwell much on that book which to me can at best be described as one of the Alice in Wonderland series of books.

Some of the achievements the President mentioned in his Green Book were either non-existent, mere intentions or projects whose contract sums were inflated not only unreasonably but also unjustifiably.

It was sad that at a time Ghanaians were suffering with unemployment and crime rate being on the ascendancy, the President and his government would still waste State resources to write a book full of fairytales.

Couldn’t the President have used the money to provide MRI machine at the Tamale Teaching Hospital or pay some money into the NHIS to ease the suffering patients face when they go to hospitals? Couldn’t the President have used the money to buy chalk and dusters for those schools in the country without even chalk to write?

It is evident from the way President John Dramani Mahama is struggling to market himself and his party that they are not doing well. A government that has done very well will not be writing by force books to tell their story. The Ghanaian people would have written their own books for the President and even recommend him for the award of the Mo Ibrahim Award for leadership and good governance.

Now that the NDC and President Mahama are obsessed with writing books, I would like to know when a book on corruption, extreme thievery and deep fraud will be written by them.

Only recently in the news is a story about the AMERI scandal in which several billions of Ghana cedis is to go down the drain in view of a criminally minded contract to bring into this country a power badge that has only worsened the current electricity supply.

The President in a desperate move to advertise himself used Ghc 3.6Million to rebrand 116 Metro Mass Buses with one costing Ghc 31,000.00 at a time the country is at the mercy of the IMF accepting loans under duress and in callous terms. It must be stated that the organisation that did the printing of the stickers for the buses said, it took 11.600Ghc for the work done and not the outrageous amount officially presented to the parliament of Ghana.

Cases of corruption have featured at the Youth in Employment Agency, National Service Secretariat, SADA, and The Judiciary among other agencies on wider scales with billions of the Tax payers sweat going down the drain which could have been used for social intervention programmes in some communities of Ghana.

We still have schools in Ghana in which students lie on their bellies to write. We still have schools in Ghana where there are no school blocks to house the pupils. They sit under trees and when it rains or about to rain it becomes a natural holiday in such communities.

In the SDA Primary School in the Wa Central constituency, pupils are using blocks as tables and chairs. In some hospitals in Northern Ghana, there are no incubators to keep new babies when the need arises. Some doctors don’t have gloves to wear and work.

In some communities, feeble lights from mobile phones are the source of lights for serious and urgent operations and in the middle of all these, the government of John Dramani Mahama has used Ghc3.6 Million to rebrand Metro buses with his picture when the space on those buses could have been sold to corporate organisations for adverts and bring more money to maintain those buses.

Whilst the President and his Ministers are shouting and telling unreasonable lies about their Green book, could they respectfully tell us when they will write a Black Book on corruption?

We are waiting.
By Akilu Sayibu
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