Put Food On Our Tables And Stop These Flippant Tours

President John Dramani Mahama

Unless both the President and his Town Crier (or Communications Minister) have the memory capacity of poultry birds, I don’t know the value of this electioneering baloney called “Accounting to the People Tour” (See Pulse.com.gh / Ghanaweb.com 4/23/16). Already, Mr. John Dramani Mahama has let it be sternly known to Ghanaians in no uncertain terms, that about the only citizens who are qualified to criticize his job performance and offer him any worthwhile and/or meaningful advice are former Presidents Jerry John Rawlings and John Agyekum-Kufuor. Even more significantly, President Mahama has made it pointedly clear that even professional expertise does not cut it.

In other words, even economically savvy Oxbridge-educated professionals like Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, the former Deputy-Governor of the Bank of Ghana and three-time Vice-Presidential Candidate of the country’s largest political party, do not qualify to critique his performance and offer their well-informed and well-intended assessments because they have never been offered the mandate by the Ghanaian people to occupy the Flagstaff House.

And so, really, what is the point in pretending to be accounting to the very people you claim have absolutely no constitutional right to criticize your job performance for your stewardship? Dear reader, do me a favor: please don’t write to complain about an article or write-up that is chock-full of verbal abuse or insults, because it was President Mahama and his bootlicking staff of cabinet appointees and hangers-on who started this entire verbal slugfest.

Besides, Ghanaians are far more sophisticated than the likes of Messrs. Mahama, Amissah-Arthur, Portuphy, Asiedu-Nketia, Anyidoho and Adams are willing to give them credit for. This is an election year; which means that our woefully underperforming President is very close to wetting his bed and soiling his pants.

Most of his electioneering campaign promises – in sectors of the economy as divergent as Education, Healthcare, Agriculture and Transportation – have turned out to be a gigantic hoax; and I guess about the only option left for the “Ganja Boy” is to embark on a farcical tour of open and shameless bribery in the grotesque name of culture. One would have thought that his State-of-the-Nation Address (SONA) to Parliament earlier in the year met this “Accounting to the People” burlesque of a self-promotion tour.

Indeed, if he were the kind of progressive and/or epically successful leader that he wants Ghanaian voters to believe he has been, Mr. Mahama would rather have farmed out the need to systematically and meticulously explain the purportedly yeomanly achievements of his government to his obscenely overpaid cabinet appointees and some of the party’s key policymakers and parliamentary point men and women, while he concentrated his energies on other more significant matters pertaining to effective governance.

Obviously, he does not seem to have much to do at either the Flagstaff House or the various sectors of the economy, thus his rather vacuous decision to embark on a fuel- and flight-free junket across the land, as well as to further insult the intelligence of the Ghanaian people with even more outrageous promises. The Akan-speaking people have a saying that “If Mr. Naked promises you a bolt of cloth, you just listen to his name.”

The President’s Town Crier says that it was “an eye-opener for [Mr. Mahama] when the Chief of Chinderi said this was the first time a President was visiting his community.” What kind of “eye-opener” is this but the unmistakable pronouncement by the Chief of Chinderi that the Mahama-led government of the National Democratic Congress has been a massive failure? The Akan also have a saying that “If the duiker/antelope does not make it to the marketplace, his hide/skin does.” Nowhere in the news report about his meeting with the Chief of Chinderi is the latter heard or reported to be expressing the gratitude of his township for any remarkable development projects the Mahama government is known to have recently undertaken there.

I bet the NDC Abongo Boys and Girls would have a far better chance preaching their legion poppycockish socioeconomic mendacities from their Muammar Gaddhafy-inspired Green Book than presuming so cavalierly and unconscionably to have invented former President John Agyekum-Kufuor’s National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS). Come on, “Ganja Boy,” tell me more about your Cash-and-Carry health scam-artistry and stop jiving as if Ghanaians were accursed with the memory capacity of a guinea pig.

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