Narcissistic Spio-Garbrah Will Never Be a Good NDC Flagbearer – Part 1

Spio-Garbrah

He has been upfront and center of all the regressive governance policies of the Rawlings-fangled National Democratic Congress (NDC), since the morphing of the erstwhile Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) junta into the former; and so, really, to tell the Dear Reader the Honest-to-God Truth, the former Rawlings’ Communications Minister has absolutely nothing progressive or meaningful to offer civilized and forward-looking Ghanaians. He may want to talk about the purportedly seminal role that he played in the establishment of the Ghana Education Trust Fund (GETFund), but the factual reality is that the thoroughgoing corrupt and elitist leaders of the National Democratic Congress have created more illiterate and criminally ill-educated and undereducated Ghanaian youths than any other political party or government since 1957.

It was the leaders of the NDC who scandalously mooted and implemented the budgetary corner-cutting 3-year Senior High School System that is not practiced anywhere in the most advanced and industrial democratic world, which effectively bastardized the hitherto progressive Ghanaian public school curriculum and sent Ghanaian education tumbling to the very bottom of the 146 public school systems surveyed by the UN-affiliated and Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) some 7 years ago. But what is even more worrisome is the stiff resistance with which the leaders of the National Democratic Congress have met President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo’s fee-free Senior High School Policy Initiative, which is aimed at ensuring that every SHS-age student with the aptitude to attend any SHS anywhere in the country would not be held back or prevented from doing so on grounds of poverty or indigent familial background.

And guess what progress-stalling NDC leaders like Mr. Alban SK Bagbin, the longest-sitting parliamentarian in Fourth-Republican Ghana had to say about this most laudable and progressive nation-building initiative? You guessed right, Dear Reader: the man who has been nicknamed the Nadowli-Kaleo Methuselah publicly cursed under his breath and threatened to take legal action against what Mr. Bagbin curiously termed as the flagrant violation of our Fourth-Republican Constitution, which Mr. Bagbin pontifically insisted prohibited the fee-free education of each and every under-20-year-old Ghanaian youth. I will fully touch on this systematically orchestrated “Bagbin Madness” in due course. For now, let us turn our attention to the just-ended essay competition that Mr. Ekwow Spio-Garbrah reportedly organized for some 29,000 (Twenty-Nine-Thousand) NDC’s Communications Team Members scattered across the length and breadth of our beloved country.

As usual, this essay competition was not about what its originator and benefactor claimed the same to be. Rather, it was wholly and exclusively about the brazen political upstart who once virulently called the late President John Evans Atta-Mills “irreparably damaged goods” (See “Why Spio-Garbrah Will Be a Good NDC Flagbearer Essay Competition Launched” Graphic.com.gh / Ghanaweb.com 8/2/18). You see, you would have thought that a progressive team-playing Mr. Spio-Garbrah would ask the essay contestants to highlight some of the most significant and visionary policy initiatives of the National Democratic Congress which are worth considering by all Ghanaian voters in the leadup to the 2020 general election. Instead, having decided long beforehand that his own party, the National Democratic Congress, has absolutely nothing worthwhile or tangible and meaningful to offer the ordinary Ghanaian citizen and the hardworking and taxpaying voter, Mr. Spio-Garbrah has apparently concluded that his individual personality as a politician and a sometime diplomat are far more important and relevant to put on display than seriously discuss why Ghana’s former Ambassador to the United States thinks and/or believes that the National Democratic Congress is a viable alternative to the Akufo-Addo-led New Patriotic Party.

Indeed, so desperate is the man Spio-Garbrah intent on being elected President of the Democratic and Progressive and Civilized (at least my part of the country) Republic of Ghana, that he seems to think that his very modest and ordinary personal achievements are all that Ghanaians need to move their corruption-riddled country to the cutting edge of Twenty-First Century development and civilization.

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

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
August 21, 2018
E-mail: [email protected]