Fiifi Kwetey is a screaming mess at Transport Ministry

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

He is obviously earning an undeservedly fat check in the Mahama cabinet because the 49-year-old Mr. Fiifi Kwetey acquitted himself creditably as a rotten-mouthed propaganda point-man for the Rawlings-minted National Democratic Congress (NDC) by the blighted lights and rag-tag standards of the latter political juggernaut, of course.

I have also followed his bumbling political career as a Deputy Finance Minister to an equally incompetent Finance Minister, a professional bean-counter by the name of Seth Terkper, through his gross disservice as Agriculture Minister and now a largely tardy and absentee Transportation Minister.

And so I am not the least bit surprised that the South Korean Ambassador to Ghana, Mr. Woon-Ki Lyeo, would also find Mr. Kwetey and his minions to be equally grossly incompetent at the country’s Transportation Ministry (See “Korean Ambassador Blasts Ghanaian officials Over Lateness” Graphic Online / Modernghana.com 9/2/16).

I don’t know whether there is a Trokosi Nationalist edge to this thoroughgoing gross administrative incompetence at the Transportation Ministry whose last cabinet appointee was Mrs. Dzifa Attivor, the woman who made an untenable ethnic-persecution issue out of her part in the criminal scheme to cream the Ghanaian taxpayer of millions of dollars in the presidential-image spray-painting of municipal public buses.

The Korean Ambassador’s bitter complaint came when Mr. Woon-Ki and a team of South-Korean engineers waited for close to an hour for some key operatives of Ghana’s Transportation Ministry to arrive for the start of a meeting geared towards the drastic reduction of traffic congestion in Ghana’s capital of Accra by 2035.

The Seoul government, in addition to supplying engineers to facilitate the designing of a Master Plan project for Accra, and hopefully other large Ghanaian urban centers as well, has also shelled out a grant of $1.5 million towards the realization of the aforesaid project.

Mr. Kwetey, who had originally been scheduled to meet with and address the Koreans was a no-show, he had apparently backed out of the meeting at the last minute and had to be pinch-hit for by Mr. Selby Twumasi-Ankra, Chief Director of the Ministry of Transport.

Very likely, Mr. Kwetey was busy campaigning in his Ketu-South constituency, where he has promised at least 100,000 votes, at least 100-percent over the constitutionally stipulated maximum, for President John Dramani Mahama in the December 7 general election.

What we find interesting to observe here is the fact that Mr. Kwetey’s pathologically cynical and tardy attitude is strikingly the norm among Ghanaian politicians, irrespective of party and/or ideological suasion and membership.

And such utterly unwholesome tardiness, even as impatiently observed by Ambassador Woon-Ki, may be the single most damning stumbling block to the rapid sociocultural and technological advancement of that otherwise historically and culturally rich West African nation.

“Ghanaians should learn to respect time, because it is a valuable and precious resource.” One could not agree more with Mr. Woon-Ki. But, of course, the South Korean diplomat’s observation has far-reaching implications well beyond raw temporal value.

The fact of the matter is that not only do Ghanaian politicians, and leaders in general, not have much sense of value and respect for time, they actually have little respect for the very citizenry whose most loyal “obedient servants” they claim to be. “This is your time,” Ambassador Woon-Ki was reported to have warned and poignantly added, “Your government is wasting valuable time just like that. In Korea, if we schedule a program to start at 9 am, it starts at the same time.”

In other words, in the opinion of Ambassador Woon-Ki, until Ghanaian politicians and leaders begin doing some serious soul-searching and critical thinking about the way in which they manage their time, vis-à-vis the business affairs of the country’s citizenry, Ghana’s clock of development is unlikely to move abreast with that of the rest of the most progressive nations of the world.

This also explains President Mahama’s bitter complaint that the four-year tenure stipulated by the country’s 1992 Fourth-Republican Constitution is woefully inadequate.

Sixty years into the postcolonial era, Ghanaian politicians and leaders have yet to mature into full-fledged responsible adults. Which was why a recent parliamentary recall for the consideration of an impeachment motion on a pathologically payola-driven President Mahama culminated in a predictable circus act, in which Speaker Edward Doe Adjaho, a former Member of Parliament of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC), had occasion to cavalierly mock the motion, tabled by the members of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), the main parliamentary opposition, for feigning ignorance of the dog-tired ancient maxim of the dead’s being ethically and legally bereft of biting teeth or fangs.