A letter to the President: Decision to pay spouses of presidents and vice presidents is a complete misplaced priority

Mr. President, accept my warmest and heartfelt greetings from the countryside, more particularly, a village boy from Sakogu, in the Northeast region of Ghana.

I write to amplify the voices of the millions of voiceless Ghanaians who cannot afford to speak to you and to express their concerns or views with regard to your decision to pay spouses of both presidents and and vice presidents salaries despite the fact that your decision is constitutionally unfounded.

I say unfounded because it is a total breach of the article 71 of the 1992 constitution which defines who a salaried worker is and the respective functions! Mr. *President, do you know there are a lot of Ghanaians who cannot afford to have 3-square meals a day?*

"Three(3)-square meals a day," I mean!

Your Excellency, do you think your wife is not affording three(3)- square meals a day?

If I may ask again, but humbly, Mr President, the allowances that are accorded your wife is not enough for her to live a more decent life?

Even your salaries and allowances, Mr. President, are not enough to take care of your wife? Are the suffering Ghanaians plight not so dear to your heart?

Well, if your responses are in the affirmative, then let's revert to the constitution to ascertain what you intend doing under this particular circumstance where the constitution is at variance with your unconscionable intention to have your spouses paid.

Mr. President, what you intend to do, is it a constitutional obligation your office is trying to fulfill or you are exercising your arbitrary powers?

I, personally, and on a more humanitarian grounds, find your decision to expend the taxpayer's money to constitute a committee to see to it that your wife and Vice President's are salaried, a complete misplaced priority especially under a Covid-ravaged Ghana that is not only hugely dependent on external borrowing to survive but is equally highly characterized by military brutalities, serial murders, unemployment, corruption and unprecedented economic hardships.

Mr. President, it is humanly saddening to note that in the countryside, there are still communities without health facilities, portable water and schools. Do you pretend to be at the blind side if these deplorable issues in the country or it is just an attempt to ignore the masses and their plights?

The absence of these life threatening social services in our communities does not attract your emotions, Mr. President? For example, Mr. President, labouring mothers sometimes die on their way to hospitals simply because of the absence of nearby health facilities.

Two, Mr. President, children who have to move to other communities to attend school, cross rivers before getting to school, and sometimes get drowned just because they have no schools in their neighborhoods.

Don't you know all these, Mr. President? Again, sometimes, it amounts to weeping to see the kind of water that some citizens of this country drink; there are instances where people and animals take the same water because there is no portable water. The animal's faecal matter sometimes get remained in the water too, in trying to compete with humans for the water.

Despite the above developmental challenges we are faced with as a nation, the president of the republic attention is not rather drawn to that but his wife's welfare which is of paramount significance to him. Is this a quality of a listening and caring leadership as we are being made to believe, fellow citizens?

It is time our leaders placed premium on the concerns of the suffering masses who are struggling to make ends meet by paying their kids school fees, medical bills and providing portable water to them in order to enable them live relatively more decent lives other than wasting state resources on the already financially endowed like the President's wives or spouses just to gain matrimonial considerations in your bedrooms.

*I am a citizen, not a spectator…!!!*

#Villageboy

Yentik Gariba
Northeast