A Development Project Endorsement that Transcends Partisan Politics

That is what all the constituency bipartisan, and cross-partisan, leaders ought to have been doing for quite a while now. I am hereby referring to the morally and psychologically enlightening decision by the leaders of the Ahanta-West Branch of the country’s main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) to heartily and unreservedly endorse President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo’s plan to build a hospital in the Ahanta-West Constituency of the Western Region (See “Ahanta-West NDC Endorses Akufo-Addo’s Hospital Project” Ghana News Agency (GNA) / Modernghana.com 5/21/20).

For starters, the money or funding involved in the proposed hospital project is public money, which means that such funding is each and every Ghanaian taxpayer’s money. We would be delighted if residents of the Ahanta-West Constituency voted massively for the Akufo-Addo-led government of the New Patriotic Party to continue this project that was reportedly supposed to have been initiated and completed by the previous John Dramani Mahama-led regime of the National Democratic Congress but never even got off the proverbial architectural drawing board.

But, of course, it really and sincerely does not matter because, at the end of the day, each and every Ghanaian citizen has an inalienable right to decide which of any of the legitimately registered political parties they choose to endorse and/or become registered bona fide members, supporters and sympathizers of. This sort of healthy development thinking ought to have marked the beginning of Ghana’s Fourth Republican democratic cultural dispensation. It is also significant to learn that 8 years of the Mills-Mahama and the Mahama/Amissah-Arthur tandem regimes did absolutely nothing to bring this most vital life-saving-and-quality-of-life-improvement project to fruition.

Which, logically, ought to inform politicians and residents of the Ahanta-West Constituency that, ultimately, it is not which political party or establishment that any bona fide Ghanaian citizen belongs to that matters, but which crop of leadership has their well-being as a top priority on its development agenda. So far, it can hardly be gainsaid that President Akufo-Addo has more than amply demonstrated that he and his robust team of visionary and talented technocrats and executive and cabinet appointees have what it takes to bring palpable or substantive development back into the country.

On the latter count, Ghanaians need to be constantly reminded of the fact that it was the Jerry John Rawlings-led junta of the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), the immediate and direct institutional antecedent of the present-day National Democratic Congress, whose adamantly wrongheaded development policy led to the economically regressive dismantling of the Nkrumah-established Ghana Industrial Holdings Corporation (GIHOC), in the spurious name of a Structural Adjustment Program (SAP), that literally took Ghana back to the industrially benighted and economically rudimentary era of British colonial imperialism. It has also not helped the least bit to learn that the pet project of the previous Mahama-led regime of the National Democratic Congress was the criminal inflation of taxpayer-underwritten projects and the collection of humongous kickbacks behind closed doors by the Mahama Posse.

Ghanaians cannot afford to be returned to the Lost Decades of the 1980s and the 1990s and, to a quite significant extant, the Rawlings-Arkaah and Rawlings-Mills and Mahama/Amissah-Arthur years of Ghana’s Fourth Republic of Cash-and-Carry brutal Social Darwinian health policies and the criminally elitist public education policy agenda.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

May 21, 2020

E-mail: [email protected]