Okudzeto-Ablakwa Can Rest Assured He Is Only Fooling Himself

Last week, he went on the air claiming that the fee-free Senior High School policy agenda of the Akufo-Addo Administration was the brainchild of former President John Dramani Mahama, and so his former boss, rather than President Addo DankwaAkufo-Addo, ought to be given credit for the implementation of the same. The fact of the matter is that Mr. Samuel Okudzeto-Ablakwa is a peevish cynic and a congenital liar whose sole significance as a politician is his inimitable exhibition of himself as a veritable nuisance.

Last week, for instance, in the wake of the Kenyan Supreme Court’s annulment of that country’s August 8 Presidential Election, on forensically proven grounds of hacking and deliberate rigging of the same, the Tongu-North’s National Democratic Congress’ Member of Parliament, going to bat for his former boss, who had served as Head of the Commonwealth Observer Mission to the Kenyan election, roundly condemned Chief Justice David Maraga and his associates of the Kenyan Supreme Court for annulling the presidential aspect of the general election because, according to the former Deputy Minister of Education, the Kenyan election was far too expensive to let “frivolous” questions of hacking and the corruption of the integrity of the electoral process get in the way of the criminally cooked victory of incumbent President Uhuru Kenyatta.

Now, Mr. Okudzeto-Ablakwa is back at his nuisance game once more. This time, it is to pontifically claim that the cost of the fee-free Senior High School agenda, at some GH₵ 600 million, is too expensive to be sustainable in the long term. You can’t blame this wet-eared “baby with sharp teeth” who clearly wants to eat his proverbial cake and have it too. If, indeed, as the former Deputy Information Minister claims, the fee-free SHS policy is unsustainable, then how come he wants the seminal credit for its implementation to be accorded Mr. Mahama? Does it mean that, somehow, building castles in the air, as we shockingly witnessed in the Guinea-Fowl Scandal and the so-called Savannah Accelerated Development Authority (SADA) scam engineered by the former Rawlings Communication Minister, is more to the quality-of-life interest of the average Ghanaian citizen than the practical implementation of the fee-free SHS policy.

And on the preceding score must be made crystal clear that nobody has any illusions, whatsoever, least of all President Akufo-Addo, that the fee-free SHS policy’s implementation was a cheap proposition. Not by any realistic measure or stretch of the imagination. But the fact of the matter is that the moral imperatives of the times, especially vis-a-vis ourfairly oil-rich economy, dictates that royalties accruing from the mining of the proverbial “Black Gold” be fairly evenly spread across sectors of the economy that can equally benefit the hardworking poor and the abjectly deprived.

Indeed, at the time that Nana Akufo-Addo mooted the idea of a fee-free SHS policy agenda, the former Attorney-General and Minister of Justice publicly and categorically stated that even if the oil industry exhausted itself at some point during the course of the implementation of the program and the latter had to be abandoned, it would have been worthwhile for the government to have been able to provide free access to a qualitative education to a generation that would by then be economically well positioned to make life easier and far less hassle-fraught for its children and grandchildren than the quality of life experienced by the previous generations.

In other words, Nana Akufo-Addo is far more conscious and better informed about the details and contours of the fee-free SHS policy agenda than Mr. Okudzeto-Ablakwa and/or any of his associates of pathological cynics can presume to appreciate.

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