Opinions of Thursday, 3 December 2020
Columnist: Dr. Samuel Adjei Sarfo, Esq.
As Ghanaians go to the polls on Monday, the overriding question that must occupy their minds is exactly what is there in the Mahama government that must persuade us to return it to power. Is it its patent corruption or its incompetence or its plain lies and chicanery? Otherwise can there be any good reason why the NDC must return to rule this country?
As the NPP mantra for a previous election goes, “We must diligently ponder our condition of living and cast our votes accordingly.” And not only must we examine our present condition, but also the future prospects of all the generations that will come after we are gone.
And one standard to use in this examination is what the government has done for us with the resources it came to meet. For the test for the quality of any government is in the balance sheet of what it came to inherit and whatever it has utilized for the benefit of the people. If evaluated this way, the NDC government inherited too much and provided too little. Beyond a thriving economy from the prior NPP administration led by JAK Kufuor, there was also the revenue in oil and other natural resources that ran into billions of dollars.
To date, nobody knows whatever happened to all these huge resources. The NDC cancelled the Teacher and Nurses allowance but we don’t know what happened to the savings that government made. But we can conjecture that a large chunk of those savings was used to pay off dubious judgment debts, while some was fritted away in crony contracts and fake expenditure and bloated invoices. And all these speculations are credible insofar as all the so-called infrastructural developments were accomplished through loans, leaving the nation in unprecedented debts running into nearly thirty billion dollars.
Meanwhile the NDC government continued to stick its finger into the noses of Ghanaians by acts of brazen insults, with its latest act being the award of contract to Woyome, a person known to have duped the nation in millions of dollars and who remained a known financier of the NDC.
It suffices to say that there is no book large enough to recount the dark deeds of the NDC government whose corruption was unprecedented in the annals of this country. That is why it is a no-brainer to judge that in terms of the huge resources available to it, the NDC government woefully failed the people and left all of us in a lurch.
For all these reasons, when the people go to the polls this December 7, the question as to whether this NDC government was ever-efficient regarding its use of the people’s resources must be answered with a resounding “No”. Thereafter, the people must overwhelmingly vote for the NPP to sustain and maintain the exemplary leadership of the country.
This is because unless a person benefitted or has relatives that benefitted from the NDC government’s rape of the motherland, there ought not be any mistake at all that the NDC sold out the people’s trust and abused the people’s heritage. They merely gave us the empty wind in lieu of the fulfilment of its promises to safeguard the resources of the people. The party’s present prestidigitation and strident distractions are all their newfangled tricks to deceive the masses of the people.
Let us keep in mind that democracy, in its purest form, is all about love for country. The underlying principle of the democratic dispensation is that the people will maintain sufficient perspicacity to recognize an inept government and to vote it out of power. The democratic project has never been about tribes or parties or religion per se. It is all about the recognition of the quality of government we have, and the power to vote it out of office or to retain it in office.
And the variable for voting out a government or retaining it relies on the efficiency and honesty of the government in its use of our national resources. And as I have already noted above, the NDC government miserably failed on this account when they were given the opportunity to rule this country. It also failed to improve the living condition of the people; failed in providing economic opportunities for the people; failed to protect the health and educational needs of the people, and failed to maintain the natural environment of the countryside.
What remained of its efficiency is its wholesale sale of excuses and empty wind and whirlwind. It is now making all kinds of excuses for its failure in providing jobs, infrastructure and economic opportunities for the people, and it is now promising to accomplish in four future years, what it failed to provide for the people in eight wasted years.
And in doing this, it has vested its hope in the palpable vulnerability and gullibility of our people: That they will forget the patent corruption of the immediate past. That they will ignore the incapacity and inability and utter incompetence of the government to bring its corrupt cronies to book. That they will ignore the salient collapse of the educational, health and agricultural systems. That they will forget about Dumsor. That they will close their eyes to the impunity of the government in its award of contracts to designated fraudsters. That they will close their eyes to the moral decay of those that hid under the cloak of officialdom to perpetrate crimes against the nation……..And finally, that they will ignore the seething leprosy within the former NDC government and latch up to the empty whirlwinds of present promises…. False promises to create millions of jobs; false promises to cure the incipient corruption of yesteryears; false promises to provide health care to the masses, and false promises to build golden castles in the empty clouds. The NDC is now falsely promising the moon to Ghanaians whereas the party could not perform zilch within the eight years that it wasted in power.
Now as the saying goes, if the naked man promises you many gowns, take careful note of his name, for you will need to accost him later for his foreseeable fraud. And in this instance, the name to take careful note of right now is the National Democratic Congress, this notorious NDC government which has no good record to campaign on except on its own phantasmagoric record of lies and incompetence and unprecedented corruption.
It is this discredited name that all Ghanaians must take careful note of at all costs as they proceed to the elections on December 07, 2020. And when we all do so, we would have established the correct principles undergirding the true democratic nature of our government: That we are a wise and intelligent people who will not be taken for granted; that we know what we want and will choose the leadership we like; that we will choose a government that will serve the interest of the people at all times and preserve its fiduciary trust for the people; that corruption, wherever it is found, ought to be expiated, expunged and punished; that the people shall not be sold upon the promises of empty wind and upon the assurances of empty whirlwind.
For we the people of Ghana have chosen to affirm on this coming December 07, that this great nation, built upon the blood and sweat of the forebears, shall be protected and defended from all those greedy bastards with sharp teeth hoodwinking us; and that whatever remains now of our duty to put sharp nails in the casket of this NDC, we shall do it with alacrity to the great benefit of posterity and the glorious future of those unborn.
Remember the free SHS. Remember the free electricity and water. Remember planting for food. Remember the NABCO. Remember Digitization and remember the restoration of the teacher and nursing allowances……Remember the NPP government and all its achievements in these four years. And when you remember all these, you will ignore the lies and fiction and look at all that have happened in your life and return the NPP and President Akufo-Addo to power for four more years for Nana to do more.