Continued From Page 3 Of Yesterday's Issue What Mills Has Not Done

But in Ghana of Professor Mills, August came with perhaps the most severe shortage of premix fuel, used specifically in outboard motors. Newspapers carried sad and angry cartoons of disillusioned fishermen queuing with gallons for fuel that never came. And the shoals of fish swam past Ghana's shores singing Hallejujah.

Education? This is a critical sector that every government spends much nights pondering. And rightly so since we always see the sticker: IF YOU CAN READ THIS…. Education is the foundation for every kind of development. Education produces our politicians, lawyers, engineers, doctors and every contributor to national development. The eight years of the Kuffuor administration saw the most massive dose of investments into the education sector y both government through the GET Fund and and especially the private sector [universities, first and second-cycle schools and hostels etc]. I do not quite remember the promises of Mills in this direction, but he certainly must have made a lot. Be that as it may, we are yet to see what the government of Mills has initiated by way of new programmes, ideas and projects except to re-ignite the old flogged horse of whether the senior high school system should have a three-year duration as at the present, or the same old NDC suggestion of four years. The debate was lively, with some calling for the head of the old Minister of Education, Alex Tetteh Enyo. His offence? The Minister was accused of consistency, supporting the three-year plan at one forum, and the four-year system at the next. In the melee of the spirited and politicized debate, we everyone, including government, lost sight of the fact that education falling behind and hollering us for attention. The recent Basic Education examination results tell it all. It is about the very worst in more that ten years.

It is perhaps in the health sector that the government really hit the ground running. If you asked me only a little over a month ago, I would have gladly nominated Dr Adja Sipa Yankey as the Minister of the Year. Like a welcome wind, he stormed the major hospitals and came out with terrible discoveries. Broken down infrastructure, wards under the pressure of in-patients, maternity buildings with broken down elevators etc. Wherever he went, he initiated corrective measures and I still like and respect the guy. But his time has been cut short by the Mabey and Johnson scandal, and we do not know what Ben Kumbuor can do.

The roads and transport sector has hardly initiated any new projects, and thse inherited from Kuffuor are lagging behind time. What the Ministry has accomplished so far is supervising another disastrous accident on the Volta lake, and one of the worst eight months of road carnage. People think road accidents should not be blamed on drivers and their lack of maintenance culture alone. We should also blame it on the police who accept or insist on bribes from drivers so that they can get away with dangerous car malfunctions and technical deficiencies in their driving skills. I am inclined to believe this analysis because it appears that 95% of Ghanaian adults have seen a policeman collecting a bribe from a commercial driver before. This is a true mathematical and statistical fact.

Let me digress again here with an interesting story relating to the matter under discussion. During the Kuffuor administration when Papa Owusu Ankomah was Minister of Interior, I was on a mini bus travelling to Cape Coast from Takoradi when the vehicle was stopped at the Beposo barrier by the Police. The usual scenario followed. The driver handed over his licence documents to the policeman. What followed however floored me as if I had been struck with a crowbar. The policeman opened the licence booklet and found some cedi notes neatly tucked into it. The policeman plucked the money out and gave it back to the driver, inspected the documents and handed them back to him. My amazement did not last long. The other passengers of course were as amazed as myself. Then it was explained. It had happened that a few days previously, a fairly new policeman had stopped a gentleman at the same place and had actually collected money from him. Then a colleague had harshly whispered to him. “Hey, that is the boss of the IGP! The Interior Minister!” What happened next was that the frightened recruit had dropped the money as if it was a red-hot metal and gone on his knees to beg the Minister who had reprimanded him and given the policemen a pep talk. But has the practice stopped?

Currently making the rounds of Ghana among Ghanaians is the Akan word, HWAMMO. This word refers variously to ingratitude, trickery and weighs more strongly on DECEPTION. Hwammo literally refers to an act of snatching something from someone whom you have rather promised a lot of good things.. Like the issues discussed under fuel and employment above. Hwammo is not a Northern word but there is yet a strong feeling of deception in the three northern regions. This is because the north received far more campaign promises from Mr Mills of the NDC. We can safely encapsulate all the spectrum of promises to our northern kinsmen into a Kuffuor-initiated concept: Northern Savannah Development Programme. Since both the previous and in-coming NDC administration thought up a bridging between the north and south in terms of economic development, the north became the most expectant constituency in election 2008.

Atta Mills won, and the north has been waiting for one year now for the good things promised to them to begin. But there has been a structural problem unrelated to economics stifling any attempt to commence action. It relates to peace being a foundation to development. There can ben o real development in a situation of dangerous civil unrest and armed confrontation with several dead already. The Mills administration inherited a 52-year old Dagbon crisis at a time when the crisis was in total dormancy awaiting the final steps towards resolution. It appears, however that as soon as the NDc and Mills were investitured, they went back to the ancient system of stoking the fire. And fires have the preponderance of spreading to other areas far from where the fire started. So Bawku and its environs have been in fratricidal fights whose peace-keeping has cost the Ghanaian taxpayer more than the cost of developing on of our ten regions into a middle income status, or building three new universities. What I find most harrowing is that for the lack og a government-led peace building initiatives, the people of Bawku have been living under curfew for the whole year that Mills has been in power as the President of Ghana. I indeed nearly fainted from confusion when when at one time the people of Bawku were placed under a 1 pm-10 am curfew. This curfew meant that the people of Bawku had to stay indoors for 21 hours of every 24-hour day! Such things have happened before, but not in Africa. They happen in places like Chechen, Somalia and Iraq. The NDC is not making efforts at peace building, so how can this al-important northern development programme going to begin?

Perhaps the most important promise that Mills made in his campaign and manifesto relates to the curbing of corruption which the NDC campaign smeared Kuffuor and the NPP with. Like cocaine, it now appears that corruption has no party colours, the NDC will now admit. It took several months into the Kuffuor presidency before Minister had to be fired for the highly suspicious loss of a few hundred thousand dollars meant for the senior national team for which the young Minister of Sports had to take the blame. In the case of Mills, it took only a few weeks for his also very young Minister to entangle his legs in a complex network of corruption stringing from the Ivory Coast to Germany. Then as if that was not enough, the Mabey and Johnson scandal hit the fan and spread the dirt on the government of the NDC form 1997 to surface in 2009 for which a good number of ministerial and ambassadorial heads have rolled. Corruption has dogged the Mills government in a most incriminating manner. So who is corrupt? And who is more corrupt?

Finally, let us look at the crime front. Mills promised firmly that he would bring armed robbery to book. Despite the efforts of the police and the great interventions of brave Rose Atinga Bio and her other regional counterparts, the robbers are becoming more and more brazen. Mills promised to root out the cocaine trafficking to and through Ghana. Indeed, the NDC even succeeded in tagging the NPP with cocaine, and cocaine became a hot campaign issue. Then after the change of government, the cocaine still continued flowing into and through Ghana. That was when the highly-regarded henchwoman of Mills, Ama Benyiwa Doe admitted that cocaine has no political clours! Then the new administration brazenly freed cocaine barons tried and convicted on evidence by competent Ghanaian courts!.What should Ghanaians expect next? The NDC has also smeared itself with cocaine as it did to the NPP. The most inexplicable thing that Mills has done in recent days is that after recalling Kofi Boakye to the Police Service, government announced that the great crime combatant and drug baron basher would be investigated by a committee. Committees is what has made the government of Mills inefficient. We cannot count how many committees of investigation this government has set up, but they number an unreasonable lot. We should not forget that committee members have critical jobs to attend to wherever they were called from. And as if to add insult to injury, a committee was set up by Mills to investigate he sale of government shares in Ghana Telecom to Vodacom. The circumstances leading to the setting up of this committee was such that Kuffuor and the NPP which did the deal were to be found guilty. The committee submitted the desired results and suddenly the Mills government developed cold feet and immediately distanced itself from the report after going through it. The Communications minister was therefore left with a crying report in his hands, not knowing where to take it to.

Every detailed expression of opinion must have a logical ending point. But there is a lot more that can be discussed on what President Mills has not done except that space is precious in a newspaper and one must end somewhere for the next man to begin another. I can only wish Ghanaians a modestly good Christmas so that we can silently enter 2010. And let us all hope that 2010 will bring better tidings for Ghana.