Political Crooks And Profiteers Do Not Create Meaningful Jobs, They Rip Off the People

In the runup to the 2028 New Patriotic Party’s Presidential-Election Primary, presently scheduled to take place on January 31, 2026, some of the aspirants have begun making the sort of peevish electioneering-campaign noises and promises that are at best, unforgivably insulting to the intelligence of adult and civically responsible Ghanaians and, at the worst, just plain anathema and insufferably abominable to the common sense of global humanity. They are heretical and abominable because these are private entrepreneurs who have had ample time to serve in government as either Members of Parliament and/or Ministers of State and ought to be able to point to one or two societally beneficial jobs or incentives and amenities that they have created for the people, that did not directly result in the creation of massive dividends or profits for their families and themselves but almost exclusively for the Government of Ghana and, for that matter, the Ghanaian people and taxpayers at large.

You see, creating a profit-making business on the part of any individual entrepreneur, especially one who has made himself nauseatingly infamous for shamelessly claiming to reserve the inalienable right to contribute electioneering-campaign funds to either of our major two political parties, namely, the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the presently main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), with the sole purpose and the primary objective of being awarded the largest and the most profit-making contracts at the expense of the people, such as somebody who is widely known but shall not be mentioned in this brief conversation, is really not a politician or a leader with the long-term interest and the development of Our Beloved Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana close to the vest or his/her heart, as it were.

Going into the January 31, 2026 New Patriotic Party Presidential Primary-Election, only a couple of the aspiring candidates could really and genuinely claim to have remarkably facilitated the salutary and the progressive development of the country, namely, Candidates Yaw Osei-Adutwum and former Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia, respectively. As a successful Charter School Administrator and an Award-Winning one, to boot, in California, right here in the United States of America, Dr. Yaw Osei-Adutwum, who also doubles as the New Patriotic Party’s Member of Parliament for Bosomtwe Constituency, in the Asante Region, has unprecedentedly and positively affected the overall quality, the curriculum and the direction of Ghana’s Public School System in ways that have not either been envisaged or experienced over the past 50 years or for at least two generations in the postindependence era.

Now, what the foregoing means is that Dr. Osei-Adutwum has caused a seismic pivoting or reorientation of the minds of our youths in ways that have made our future politicians, statesmen and stateswomen and labor and industrial leaders comparable to those of their classmates and peers anywhere around the world. The challenge that the country faces now, is therefore not merely the genocidal proliferation of Galamsey-oriented and self-serving businessmen and women, who hopelessly depend on their political parties being “ballot-snatched and destroyed” into power so that they can receive all the most juicy contractual awards at the expense of the wellbeing and the welfare of the overwhelming majority of the Ghanaian people.

Rather, what is direly needed here and now is to create and reconfigure or shape young minds to become technologically savvy and abreast of the latest developments of the times who can, in turn, create a green or environmentally friendly jobs and opportunities for themselves and the members of their own generation and generations well down the line, and not grizzled and superannuated socioeconomic parasites who only believe in what clearly amounts to the Creation of Modern-Day Slave Plantations and Sweat Shops that barely afford our lower-middle class and our lumpen-poor the chance to live well above and beyond a hand-to-mouth existence, such as a sizeable majority of Ghanaian citizens have been doing ever since anyone can remember.

You see, Dear Reader, you don’t need any vision-bereft career politician to tell you and the members of your family and your community that what matters most right now is ensuring that the party wins the next General Election by hook-and-or-crook, so that the same thoroughgoing and environmentally genocidal and kleptocratic politicians continue to rule the roost, as it were. In short, the overwhelming majority of Ghanaian citizens are not simply and merely looking for leaders who will be able to give them seasonal “Hand-Me-Down Jobs” until the next election comes around, and these charlatans are jackbooted from Jubilee House.

Rather, economically deprived and impoverished Ghanaians are in dire need of leaders with a nation-building agenda that will enable them to make a sustainable standard of living for themselves. Now, what the preceding means is that in the barely three months left before the New Patriotic Party’s 2028 Presidential-Election Primary, scheduled for January 31, 2026, voters need to insist on ALL FIVE CANDIDATES HOLDING TOWNHALL MEETINGS and rolling out, each and every one of them, a comprehensive overview of their National Development Agendas (NDAs), and not merely crisscrossing the country and vacuously tooting their horns about their own personal achievements, rather than their national achievements. And, by the way, these aspirants also need to listen to the needs and the concerns of the people.

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
E-mail: [email protected]