Would Atta-Mills Have Honoured Akufo-Addo?

I am glad that I am not a politician and long ago gave up the idea of becoming one altogether. I am, of course, not hereby implying that others who are interested in politics ought to be disdained or looked down upon with suspicion. I am simply more concerned with the rampant and diarrheal double-talk of politicians. Let me put it this way: When Nana Akufo-Addo assumed the reins of governance early this year, and his policy agenda of “One District, One Factory” started to gain momentum and to become a reality, the first project that we heard of was a “Kente Village” in the Volta Region; and so I don’t know what all this hullabaloo about the One District, One Factory’s having taken its seminal roots in the Ekumfi home village of the late President John Evans Atta-Mills is coming from (See “President Akufo-Addo Honors Late President Atta-Mills” Ghana News Agency / Modernghana.com 9/8/17).

The pineapple factory whose sod President Addo DankwaAkufo-Addo was widely reported to have cut in his late predecessor’s home village, recently, is all well and good, provided that the people of Ekumfi can be counted upon to supply pineapples in commercial quantities all-year-round to sustain this noble venture. Indeed, no progressive-minded Ghanaian citizen expects the Ekumfi Pineapple Factory to go the “doggy” way of the Komenda Sugar Factory which, as it turns out, was a publicity stunt wastefully mounted by the Mahama-led regime of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), in the lead-up to Election 2016, for cheap political points. I also would like to see both prominent and ordinary members of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) take any member of the NDC opposition who attempts to mischievously and criminally take credit for any NPP-initiated project to civil court and sue whomever that mischief-maker may be for heavy damages. It is time to put an effective stop to this mentally and emotionally regressive politics of deceit.

I also don’t know that it matters one way or another, whether in honoring his promise to establish a pineapple factory at Ekumfi, President Akufo-Addo was honoring a man who does not seem to have cared any much for the fortunes and the collective destiny of his own people. I mean, Prof. Atta-Mills does not seem to have cared about his ancestral village well enough to have expressly willed to have his mortal remains interred among his own kinsmen and women. Indeed, as recently as early this year, the Mills Clan was widely reported by the media to have debated the fact of whether, indeed, their most prominent scion had any ancestral links to Ekumfi rather than to the Central Region’s capital of Cape Coast. What is significant at this juncture is that the Akufo-Addo policy agenda of agro-based industrial development of the country goes ahead as scheduled with ringing success.

I shall, Divine Providence willing, make time to address that noetic NDC executive operative who recently had the scandalous impudence to label the “One District, One Factory” project as “a cottage industry.” Maybe that godforsaken cynic would do better to explain to the nation precisely what industrial development agenda the Mills-Mahama regime introduced into the country; and, also, precisely what was the impact of the same on both the country’s economy and our labor market.

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