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25.11.2017 Feature Article

What Is Wrong with “Jobs for The Boys”?

What Is Wrong with Jobs for The Boys?
25.11.2017 LISTEN

The decision by the Akufo-Addo Administration to create at least 10,000 sanitation jobs around the country ought to come as very welcome news to all environmentally health-conscious Ghanaians (See “Kofi Adda Clears Misconception[,] Insisting ‘Sanitation Brigade Not Jobs for the Boys” MyJoyOnline.com / Modernghana.com 11/19/17). As was to be expected, the visionless cynics among the hoodlum pack of the main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) took to the airwaves pooh-poohing this most laudable initiative as one that was primarily meant to appease the teeming and increasingly agitated unemployed grassroots membership of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP), as well as thank these so-called foot soldiers for helping President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo resoundingly trounce then-President John Dramani Mahama in last December’s polls.

Well, if that were really the case, this policy initiative would still be a well-reasoned progressive project, in view of the Stygian mess of an environmental hazard unconscionably created and gleefully supervised by the tandem National Democratic Congress’ regimes of Presidents John Evans Atta-Mills and John Dramani Mahama, between January 2009 and January 2017. Not very long ago, for example, Ghana was in the news headlines for allegedly being next to the dirtiest country in the West African sub-region. Not that it would have mattered anyway. But what I quickly want to point out here, at least before we proceed any further, is the fact that the so-called “feared town councils” were not constituted in the 1980s, as the MyJoyOnline.com reporter made it appear to be.

Indeed, as early as 1948, or thereabouts, Dr. J. B. Danquah was vehemently carping the British colonial regime for not taking environmental health issues in the then-Gold Coast as seriously as they were taken in Britain itself (See Danquah’s political pamphlet titled The Voice of Prophecy). Throughout much of the 1950s and 60s, well into the 1970s, the Town Councils (or Tankase) existed and were at the forefront of environmental health education in the country. which explains why Ghana was relatively free of such common poor environmental-health related epidemics as cholera and typhoid fever. Under the Mills-Mahama-led regimes of the National Democratic Congress, there were reports of the cholera epidemic having struck the University of Cape Coast, the nation’s foremost teachers’ college, and decimated quite a remarkable number of student educator-trainees. That was how low and humiliating the NDC’s movers-and-shakers had sunk the image and reputation of the country abroad.

I have absolutely no doubt that Mr. Joseph Kofi Adda, the Sanitation and Water Resources Minister, means precisely just that when he says that the “Atta Mills Doctrine” has absolutely no relevance vis-à-vis the recruitment of the proposed 10,000 sanitation workers. In other words, the hiring of workers will be squarely based on professional qualifications rather than party affiliation or ideological suasion. I have absolutely no doubt about the credibility of Mr. Adda, because the New Patriotic Party has a track-record of creating equal employment opportunities for all eligible Ghanaian citizens. The same cannot be said of the hard-nosed Cash-and-Carry Socialists of the National Democratic Congress.

If this sanitation policy succeeds in drastically reducing the spate of employment-related vigilantism in the country, it would definitely have been worth its opportune and progressive implementation. It would also have healthily neutralized these cynical and politically poisonous NDC critics from being a nuisance to both themselves and the rest of us forward-looking bona fide Ghanaian citizens.

*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
November 19, 2017
E-mail: [email protected]

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