When the plagiarist shows concern for the public purse

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

He may have created the largest cabinet size in Fourth-Republican Ghana, but his critics do not offer any rational basis of performance-based comparison to make a tangible case against the same. All they are claiming is that President Akufo-Addo’s cabinet stands the unenviable chance of becoming the most expensive, and perhaps also the most wasteful of all Fourth-Republican cabinets. “Perhaps” because these are decidedly vacuous criticisms that have yet to be sustained beyond mere hypothetical speculations.

For instance, none of the critics, largely from the main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), and led by Mr. Haruna Iddrisu, the Parliamentary Minority Leader, has given us the exact number of cabinet appointees and deputies fielded by both the governments of the late President John Evans Atta-Mills and former President John Dramani Mahama.

The rightful basis of accurate measure would, of course, be to start with the Jerry John Rawlings-led government of the National Democratic Congress from 1992 to 2000. We could then couple each of the various cabinets with the qualifications of the appointees and their respective performances vis-à-vis their individual and collective contributions towards the expansion and development of the national economy.

You see, you don’t want a certified plagiarist whose graduate degree was summarily withdrawn by the dons of our nation’s flagship academy, the University of Ghana, lecturing you about wasteful expenditure. In other words, the Parliamentary Minority Leader is a veritable metaphor for all that is amiss and wasteful about public education in Ghana.

And if this practical parasite – both intellectually and politically speaking – is convinced that he deserves every cedi and pesewa that he is being paid from the public purse, what makes the Tamale-South NDC Member of Parliament think and believe that he is any more deserving of his fat salary than each and every one of the Akufo-Addo cabinet appointees?

Needless to say, even a casual survey of the profiles of the Akufo-Addo cabinet appointees readily evinces the fact that it contains unprecedently the best and brightest of academicians, professionals and technocrats ever produced by the country since 1957. Then also, President Akufo-Addo is unarguably the oldest and most experienced Ghanaian politician ever to have been democratically elected. Compare the preceding with those barely literate and scarcely academically and professionally experienced “sharp-toothed” apparatchiks who jam-packed the cabinets of former Presidents Mills and Mahama, and Mr. Iddrisu’s criticism of the Akufo-Addo cabinet could not be more preposterous.

We must also promptly and significantly point out the fact that it was these very same National Democratic Congress’ leaders who created the criminal economic bleeding of the country that became widely known as the Judgment-Debt Bonanza, a mega-heist racket by which NDC cabinet appointees and the party’s lawyers unconscionably collaborated with foreign “gold diggers” to literally take the country’s economy to the cleaners.

In other words, what Mr. Iddrisu’s rather scandalous argument implies here is that it would be far better to blindly give away our public purse to foreign scammers of the sort reprehensibly fronted by Mr. Alfred Agbesi Woyome, with the active connivance of Messrs. Atta-Mills and Mahama, than appropriate a piddling percentage of the same in the hiring of some of the best and brightest technocrats, professionals and administrators our nation has to offer to facilitate the remarkable upgrading of the hiring standards of our people and the concomitant development of the country at large.

What is regrettable, it goes without saying, is the fact that this horrible breed of mentally retarded suited political scam-artists, represented by the likes of Mr. Iddrisu and Okudzeto-Ablakwa and Felix Ofosu-Kwakye, is what these days passes for the main parliamentary opposition leadership in Ghana. May Divine Providence save us from ourselves.