You mean payola scam-artist Manqué, Mr. Amissah-Arthur?

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

I am not on Ground Zero and so I don’t know what sort of development agenda Vice-President Kwesi Bekoe Amissah-Arthur is talking about, when the former Governor of the Bank of Ghana calls his boss an “uncompleted project” ( See “ ‘Mahama is an Uncompleted Project’ – Amissah-Arthur” Atinkafmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 11/23/16).

What I know is that right from day one, President John Dramani Mahama has more than amply demonstrated that he has absolutely no flair or talent for the highest public office of the land. I have not followed the politics of the purportedly “Dubai-like” flyover at the Kwame Nkrumah Circle. But I am very certain that once the rainy season begins, this costly project would likely do a diddly little to stanch the deadly floods that have been ravaging most of our large towns and cities for decades now.

You see, the problem with Ghanaian politics has far less to do with the construction of roads, school buildings or hospitals. It is one of a leadership that is abjectly lacking in foresight and the salutary awareness of the culture of infrastructural maintenance. For example, most of the roadways that the Mahama government claims to be constructing are actually roads that have been in existence since the gubernatorial era of Maj.-Gen. Gordon Frederick Guggisberg in the 1920s.

It was Gov. Gordon Guggisberg who seminally laid out the architectural design and foundation of the country’s major roadways. Since then, not much has really been done by way of postcolonial Ghanaian governments building what might be termed as “Virgin Roads” or new and hitherto nonexistent roads altogether.

What our leaders have been doing is to simply wait for our existing roadways to lapse into total disrepair and then come around at election time to haphazardly and shoddily coat over these roads until the next election season is upon us again.

I bet my bottom-dollar that President Mahama would be hard put to point to a single major roadway in the country which was constructed from scratch since the era of the Rawlings junta of the so-called Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), from which era the Gonja native cut his lackluster political teeth.

The fact of the matter is that the man has not been able to fulfill a single substantive promise that he has made to the Ghanaian people since July 2012, when he assumed the presidency, in the wake of the demise of President John Evans Atta-Mills.

Not only has Mr. Mahama yet to inform the Ghanaian public about the specific circumstances under which the former University of Ghana Law School professor met his dead, to make a bad matter worse, Mr. Mahama has had to deploy one cynical presidential aide or party operative after another to tediously regale the nation with some cock-and-bull stories whose sole objective has been to exculpate the dead leader’s arch-lieutenant from any criminally culpable responsibility, rather than logically and rationally afford the voting public any meaningful insight into what really happened in the couple, or so, hours leading to President Mills’ death.

Even more significant must be pointed out the fact that among the maiden and prime promises made by the then-Interim President John Dramani Mahama was the condign retrieval of the GH? 51.2 million illegally paid into the private bank account of Mr. Alfred Agbesi Woyome, the notorious National Democratic Congress’ underwriter.

Four years later, President Mahama and his cronies, holed up at the Flagstaff House, are still playing acrobatic games with both the Ghanaian taxpayer and our justice system. So what “uncompleted projects” could Vice-President Amissah-Arthur be really talking about here? Go figure!