Open letter to the Vice President

Hello Mr. Vice President, or shall I say the Discipline Gospel Preacher. Sir, if nobody has voiced words of gratitude to you for your effort at ensuring discipline in the general public, then take this letter as a complement from a humble citizen.

I honestly do admire the way you use every opportunity on any platform to preach the discipline gospel or shall I say the 'repentance from indiscipline gospel'.

We have had very few leaders like you who could be that consistent with one message for years. Your boss, the president himself begun his reign with a 'zero tolerance for corruption' gospel but in just a matter of one year we could not tell whether the message was zero tolerance or 'zelo torelance'.

Now we do not even know what the tolerance level is, whether it is still zero or there has been a shift. The reason is simply because the champion of that cause, the president, has rather been very silent lately on issues of corruption. That is definitely not what we see from thee, thou art different, for thou has been consistent with thy indiscipline gospel. I congratulate thee for that.

But I wish to narrate a very sad incident that occurred at the International Press Centre between a Journalist, yours truly, and one of your Protocol details. The occasion was the launch of the book, Jubilee Ghana, by the Graphic Communications Group on February 27, 2007. That was about four months ago. Four months is quite long, but I wrote this letter on the very day of the incident but I decided to hold it up for a number of reasons.

The issue was about parking. Yours truly, being a journalist considered the Press Center as my home (in terms of my fraternal affiliation) but when I arrived at the center with my car, I allowed the police personnel there to park me where they will. The police asked me to park behind Peugeot car with registration number UW 304 X.

In fact I would have loved to park differently, but the voice of discipline told me to allow the police to do their job, since the Vice President, your good self that is, was coming to centre.

Later on while the programme was on-going I had to leave so I sent a note to the MC, Kwami Sefa Kayi to announce that driver of Peugeot Car with Registration number UW 304 X, which happened to be one of the cars in your (Vice President's) convoy, should re-park for me to move out.

To my amazement the driver of the car, one Enoch Mensah said to be one of leading members of the Vice President?s Protocol detail came accusing me of wrong parking. I told him that it was the police who asked me to park where I did and not by my own decision.

Mr. Mensah still insisted that I should have known better. But I also insisted that I couldn?t have done otherwise because even though the press center was my home as a journalist, I needed to be disciplined enough to allow the police to do their work to ensure that the place was ready for the Vice President to come in. The watch word for me was discipline.

But he would not budge, he still insisted that I should not have parked behind his car, as if to say that I should have acted in an indiscipline manner and refused to listen to the instructions of the police.

My insistence on doing the right thing got him angry to the extent that he refused to move his car and walked away, insulting me ?kwasea (Fool), foolish talk? and more. I later reported to one of your senior security men and I declared my intentions to write an open letter to you on the matter. Indeed I told Mr. Mensah that the fact that he was a security man did not give him the license to misbehave.

He insulted me some more and moved towards the dark, inviting me to follow him with my 'foolish statements' and he would teach me ?some sense? as we say in local parlance. 'Discipline' was not a watch word for him in the least.

I was really amazed because this man is supposed to be one of the close disciples of the discipline gospel preacher, your good self, and he demonstrated such gross indiscipline by telling me I should have thrown the instructions of the police to the wind and parked in my own way, secondly by refusing to move his car even after the MC announced it, thirdly by insulting me and finally by declaring his intentions to assault me.

I thought the days of such acts of indiscipline and arbitrary assault by security guards of state functionaries was a thing of revolutionary heady days of His Jerryship. I did not think that people like Mr. Mensah were still around and they are still that close to the seat of government, especially with all the preaching on discipline.

In fact I am told that Mr. Mensah is actually a product of the arbitrary regime of the PNDC and he has managed to come this far. Obviously he did not shed off that load of his indisciplined past and so he is at a loss as to the difference between a democracy and the military de facto regime he came from.

He would rather that civilians like myself disregarded the police and listened to people like him or else we (the civilians) would be disciplined by ordeal. I don?t blame him; he does not seem to know any better.

But Sir, You do have a choice. I think you deserve better than having such an indiscipline character around you. I must say I was very impressed with the way one of your senior security men, a man I personally know as ?Flash Away? during his athletic days at Osu, handled the matter and asked us not to disturb the function with our squabble, but Mr. Mensah kept calling me ?kwasea? even after we had both been advised to quit it.

More grease to your elbow, Sir. You really need it, especially if your own close disciples are not yet discipled of what discipline is all about.

Views expressed by the author(s) do not necessarily reflect those of GhanaHomePage.