R
Raymond
Guest
Politicians and the other scoundrels
"I was really too honest a man to be a politician and live." ----
Socrates
Filed under: polemics -- alaye @ 8:19 pm
Politicians and the other scoundrels
Filed under: polemics -- alaye @ 8:19 pm
"A dead politician is the noblest work of God." - Anonymous.
"The greatest question which, in all ages, has disturbed mankind, and
brought on them in greatest part of those mischiefs which have ruined
cities, depopulated countries, and disordered the peace of the world,
has been, not whether there be power in the world, nor whence it came,
but who should have it." - John Locke.
Would you let an unqualified cobbler repair your shoe?
Would you allow an untrained tailor to sow your cloth?
Would you join a vehicle driven by an untrained and inexperienced
driver?
Would you allow an unqualified doctor attend to your health?
Would you take your case to unlicensed lawyer?
Would you let just anyone build your house or repair your gas leakage?
Would you, would you, would you? The questions we can pose here are
endless, but if you are like the regular bloke, your answer to all
would be a deafening NO!
Since human began to organize themselves into societies, they have
strove to moderate their conduct by making laws and ordinances to
govern the affairs between their members. They have also strove to
protect members from unscrupulous shacks by requiring those who want
to peddle any profession to acquire some knowledge, gain some diplomas
or certificates, get some apprenticeship and obtain a license before
they begin to peddle their trade. That explains why even recruits at
the lowest rung of the security services and other organisations are
required, by law, to have some minimal level of qualifications. That's
how it is; and it's exactly how it ought to be.
But, wait a sec! There's is a profession where neither skill,
experience nor a diploma is required, demanded or expected. No, not
farming! It is POLITICS.
Are you serious, Femi? Yes, I am serious. Absolutely!
This explains why a complete buffoon (in the truest sense of the
world) could wake up one morning and staggers to his pito bar and put
some of the potent stuff in his stomach. Inebriated to a good measure,
our fellow staggers to one of FM stations and announces his intention
to run for the presidency. This is a guy who has never seen the inside
of a SSS! Ok, he has money from his numerous shady land deals, but is
that all one need in order to lead? Or more correctly, should money,
and plenty of it be the only qualification for high offices in our
land?
"One of the principal qualifications for a political job is that the
applicant knows nothing about what he is expected to do." - Terry M.
Townsend
What most people do not realize is that politics is the most important
profession in the land. Get this straight, I do not mean to demean the
medical, the ICT, the architectural or the rest of the noble
professions.
But just think of this: politicians make the laws on how we live and
lead our lives. Period. They determine how you live and breathe; where
you can work and live. They determine what sanction you get for
stealing a finger of banana or for sleeping with your friend's wife or
raping your neighbour's daughter, etc, etc. And if that's not serious
enough, they also determine what percentage of our income you and I
pay as taxes. And to round it up neatly, politicians are the only
people who can determine their own salaries! Let me know if you can
beat that. And what fantastic salaries they always vote for
themselves! And don't forget that when it comes to voting massive
emoluments for themselves, party rivalries miraculously vanish as our
politicians loot (literally and figuratively) the treasury.
We are HIPC (remember that word?), yet our politicians continue to
treat our treasury like a war booty that must be despoiled. The
Constitution prescribed for us an Executive Presidency. What our
politicians have managed to create was a Presidency almost imperial in
its opulence. Or would someone tell me what on earth our President
needs all those gleaming four-wheel jeeps in his entourage for!
Before you hang me, just be mindful of the simple fact that in the
Netherlands (one of the countries that 'donates' money to Ghana), the
leader of the country, that's the Prime minister, lives in his own
house and drives his own car. Each and every single member of the
Dutch Parliament lives in his\her house. And any Dutch MP who has an
urgent need for a car or a house doesn't bother the state with a
request for assistance - she goes to her bank and arranges things for
herself.
See, what I mean. The vast difference here is that in the Netherlands,
people go into politics to render a service. They mostly want to serve
their country and to give something back to the land of their birth.
In contrast, our politicians believe that their positions entitle them
to the best in the world and at the state's expense, of course!
"The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every
class is unfit to govern" - Lord Acton.
Look at the situation in our dear motherland. Not only do we house our
MPs, we also grant them car loans from our paltry resources. And our
Ministers are truly a class unto themselves. They not only get free
autos courtesy of the state, but we are also fueling the autos they
use mostly to chauffeur their girlfriends around. I say it is time a
serious political science Ph.D does her dissertation on what our
democracy in costing us.
But the main gripe here is why do we allow the politicians to get away
with it? If any other professional group has performed as abysmally as
our politicians, we all would be screaming blue murder and baying for
blood. The politicians' blood, I mean. Yes, our politicians have
treated us shabbily and with the utmost disdain, I tell the truth. But
here they are again baring their ivories and doing what they do best,
politicking, which, essentially, is lying through their teeth.
"No man (woman) undertakes a trade he has not learned, even the
meanest; yet every one thinks himself sufficiently qualified for the
hardest of all trades,-that of government. "- Socrates
Ok, let me bore you guys silly with some litanies of woes. Our dear
motherland, Ghana was conceived by the British intrigues to achieve
their imperial ambitions. When you sit down to think about it, you
will come to see that our beloved Ghana does not make logical,
cultural, geographic, historic... sense. The only logic binding was the
imperial logic of forcible acquisition. The British simply want it
that way and that was that. They ruled the waves the, didn't they! And
you do not argue with maxim machine guns, do you?
They colonized (or civilized, choose what you may) us for about a
century and handed our land back to us. Oh, I am jumping too fast
here. The true story is that many of our elite, especially those who
had the benefit of the white man's education decided that they have
had enough of been ruled by people who were not of their own kind.
They talked big grammar and threatened hell and brimstone. The
colonizer (or civilizer) threw some of them in jail and shot some of
the hoi polloi who protested too much. The blood of the patriots ran
on our sacred soil. Things got a bit out of control here and there.
The Germans waged and lost a second war (how silly could you be?).
Although the Allies won (with great unacknowledged contribution from
Africa), but in reality only the Americans won. The war effectively
bankrupted Ghana's self-styled mother country. Britain lost her Global
leadership to the Yankees. The Empire started crumbling. It was the
time for the Wind of Change when the colonials started gaining back
what the perfidious albion from that Isle of iniquities had illegally
taken from them.
Okay, enough history. Let's pick the thread of our story on our
politicians. Oh, the British handed power over to our folks in 1957,
making us the second country in Africa to gain our liberation. For
those interested in that sort of things, Sudan beat us by a year;
January 1, 1956 to be precise. Sudan is the largest country in Africa
and the name means: 'land of the blacks' (and why not show off a bit
while we are still at it?).
So folks, we have being ruling ourselves for more than half a century
and how have we fare? According to our politicians, we have never had
it so good. Life is so good here that those complaining urgently
require psychological (no, make that psychiatric) treatment. They,
politicians, and their media (it is no secret that politicians own the
majority of the media here, or is it? So much for objective
journalism!) are dazzling us with arrays of bewildering statistics
that purportedly shows how well we are doing as a nation and as a
people. Inflation, they tell us, is down and is well under control.
Jobs have been created and are available except for lazybones who have
been imbibing too much of the Ghana's contribution to world's
beverage. I am talking about akpeteshi. And food, oh, they are so
plentiful and affordable (tautological, since inflation has been wiped
out, food should be cheap).
But wait a mo, is this the reality we ordinary folks see? Are our
folks so mentally deranged that they prefer to sell Made-in-Indonesia
mosquito coils in scorching sun than to do the government-created
jobs? I do not know the answer to that one. I also do not understand
the arcane subject they call economics. And you can just forget
financial statistics; that's way, way beyond me. What is not beyond me
is this. No, I better show you a small figure and you can make up your
own mind whether or not the monster of inflation has been miraculously
wiped out from our dear land.
ITEM PRICE (2000) PRICE (2007)
Candle 250 1,200
Gari (per Olonka) 2,500 12,000
Maize (per bag) 50,000 250,000
Kerosene (per gallon) 5,000 28,900
Ga Kenkey 500 2,000
See, here I mention only the items that are of interest to the common
woman and money-challenged folks like me. Who, but the seriously rich,
is interested in the prices of milk, sugar, margarine and exotic
stuffs like those?
When you look at the figures, you do not need a Ph. D to know that
something is seriously amiss when. If an Olanka of Gari cost 2500cedis
in the year 2000 and cost 12,000cedis in 2007 and the politicians are
telling you and me that they have banished inflation from Ghana,
something certainly doesn't give. This is not hearsay, my friends. I
bought gari in 2,000 and I am still buying Gari today; so I know what
I'm talking about. The politicians are certainly telling lies when
they claimed to have tamed inflation. Inflation is well and alive, at
least at the markets where I buy my Gari. Perhaps the politicians have
created special market for themselves. There would be no surprises
there, either.
See, I do not like to be lied to. Which brings us to the question of
what I am going to do about it? And this brings us, in a roundabout
way, to the main reason for this article. I am as mad a hatter when I
see the sad parade of those clamoring to rule us spewing the same
verbiage (you can substitute garbage if you want) that they have being
spewing over the years. And their paid pals of the press are doing
what they do best - collecting their envelopes and writing their pure
fictions and befuddling us with their stupid lies.
Ok, we Ghanaians are not world champions when it comes to reading. And
it is true that many (I won't use most) of us simply go through life
without reading anything more serious than our lotto papers. But tell
me, how does a nation developed politically and socially and
economically without a quality press to keep those in power on their
toes? Most Ghanaian journalists seem totally unaware that it is the
job and the duty and the obligation of the writer to be the conscience
of her society. Otherwise, Ghanaian papers would not be so always full
of crappy, re-hashed stories about our politicians and their antics.
"Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors." -
Ralph Waldo Emerson.
And we as citizens also have obligations which does not begin and end
with our casting our votes on election days. Our most important
obligation is to leave our nation in better shape than we met it.
That's the sacred duty of every citizen of this land. And why is that
so important? No, no, it is not for purely altruistic reasons.
Actually, it is for very selfish reasons. Oh, Oh! Ah, Ah!
Let me explain. You love your children, don't you? Is it not your wish
to leave them in better situation than you live? I'm assuming that
you're a caring parent. You want your child to be better than you. You
want her to have better education than you; a better living standard,
let us say. You went through life in great hardship, waging constant
battle in order to scrap a miserable existence out of life. You live
in a roaches-infested, mosquito-overwhelmed room unfit for pets in
some countries, from which the land-lord (sorry, slumlord) is
constantly treating to eject you. You never ride a decent car in your
life; you always travel in the scrap of heaps we called trotro. You
never in your life drank from a tap water and electricity is something
you glance from afar. That certainly is not the life you want your
child to live in, is it now? So what the hell, I ask again, are you
doing about it?
That is, of course, the biggest problem. Everyone recognizes the
problem. But hardly anyone is doing something to fix it. That
precisely is why the politicians are taking us for sweet rides, year
in year out. They knew that we do not care enough to even be
apathetic. They know and we know that most of us go through life
without the thought of leaving it in better shape than we met it. Now
you know why they always take us for granted. No, I'm not telling you
anything new. You just haven't taken the time and the trouble to sit
down and try to figure things out. See what I mean?
Ghana will be better when all of us start to take our civic
responsibilities seriously. We should start by compelling those
aspiring to rule (and Lord over us) to start by providing us with
detailed plans of what they intend to do for the nation when elected.
Hell no, I am not talking about some canned party manifesto of obscure
origin and of zero knowledge value.
No, in this age of internet and broadband (you see that I also know
the lingo), those aspiring to rule us should be able to assemble
competent specialists in various field who can help them create
detailed position papers which you and I can access on their websites.
If they can donate nine figures to their parties, they should be able
to organize something for the specialists, so that we voters can
better understand where they are coming from and where they are going.
No, I do not mean the sad charade they called presidential debates.
Specifically, anyone aspiring to the presidency of this country should
have detailed position papers on:
1. Education - This I believe to be the most important issue facing
us. I see no reason why Ghana cannot provide free and good quality
education for all her children. In this globalised world, knowledge
(acquired through education) is all that makes all the difference. It
is what separate the men from the boys; the first world from the third
world. You can have all the resources in the world, but without the
knowledge to transform them, you will remain a sad loser. Just ask our
cousins in Nigeria. To be honest, even if we spend eighty percent of
our budget educating our children, it'd be good investment.
2. Health. Health they say is wealth. I guess that kinda said it all.
3. Agriculture. You need men and women with food in their stomachs in
order to run a healthy nation and economy. There is absolutely no
reason for us, after fifty year of self-government to still be
importing British mad-cow diseased beef and rice from Thailand
4. Regional integration and African unity - Get off the high horse. In
this age and time, Ghana cannot go it alone. We need ECOWAS and we
need the AU. The Big boys in Europe are expanding their EU at a pace
that will make you dizzy. The Asians are also doing it. Pan-Africanism
is no longer a romantic dream of the Nkrumahs; the very survival of
Africa depends on it, lest the imperialists continue their rapacious
rape of our land and resources! Our nation should join others in the
West African sub region to develop a common electricity, postal,
communication and defence infrastructures.
5. Security - Honestly I do not know why I put this at numero 5.
Security is all-encompassing and all-important and should have been up
there at the top.
So fellow citizens, this is my wish list. You may add yours if you so
desire. What we should do is to make sure that every man and woman who
aspires to the presidency of our republic has detailed position papers
on all the points. The bargain here is that we give our votes to the
one whose position papers seem the most reasonable. Of course,
politicians, being who they are, can lie through it. But that's where
a simple logic comes in.
There would (no, make that will) be an election at the end of a four
year term, won't there be? The situation we have today is that any
jackass can come to our ghetto and promise to build a bridge from Tema
to Navrongo; put a TV, Fridge in every home plus a car to complete
things and we shall give him our votes and get zilch in return. The
SOB will swindle us big time and think nothing of coming back next
time to canvass our votes. It has happened before, hadn't it? Actually
it had happen several times.
So, you see if we have a candidate detailed plan, we can always take
him on the concrete things he promised to accomplish. So, how is this
going to settle our under-developmental challenges? Actually, I really
do not know and I don't believe that I said that it would. However,
what we can do is this: we can rush to our internet caf
"I was really too honest a man to be a politician and live." ----
Socrates
Filed under: polemics -- alaye @ 8:19 pm
Politicians and the other scoundrels
Filed under: polemics -- alaye @ 8:19 pm
"A dead politician is the noblest work of God." - Anonymous.
"The greatest question which, in all ages, has disturbed mankind, and
brought on them in greatest part of those mischiefs which have ruined
cities, depopulated countries, and disordered the peace of the world,
has been, not whether there be power in the world, nor whence it came,
but who should have it." - John Locke.
Would you let an unqualified cobbler repair your shoe?
Would you allow an untrained tailor to sow your cloth?
Would you join a vehicle driven by an untrained and inexperienced
driver?
Would you allow an unqualified doctor attend to your health?
Would you take your case to unlicensed lawyer?
Would you let just anyone build your house or repair your gas leakage?
Would you, would you, would you? The questions we can pose here are
endless, but if you are like the regular bloke, your answer to all
would be a deafening NO!
Since human began to organize themselves into societies, they have
strove to moderate their conduct by making laws and ordinances to
govern the affairs between their members. They have also strove to
protect members from unscrupulous shacks by requiring those who want
to peddle any profession to acquire some knowledge, gain some diplomas
or certificates, get some apprenticeship and obtain a license before
they begin to peddle their trade. That explains why even recruits at
the lowest rung of the security services and other organisations are
required, by law, to have some minimal level of qualifications. That's
how it is; and it's exactly how it ought to be.
But, wait a sec! There's is a profession where neither skill,
experience nor a diploma is required, demanded or expected. No, not
farming! It is POLITICS.
Are you serious, Femi? Yes, I am serious. Absolutely!
This explains why a complete buffoon (in the truest sense of the
world) could wake up one morning and staggers to his pito bar and put
some of the potent stuff in his stomach. Inebriated to a good measure,
our fellow staggers to one of FM stations and announces his intention
to run for the presidency. This is a guy who has never seen the inside
of a SSS! Ok, he has money from his numerous shady land deals, but is
that all one need in order to lead? Or more correctly, should money,
and plenty of it be the only qualification for high offices in our
land?
"One of the principal qualifications for a political job is that the
applicant knows nothing about what he is expected to do." - Terry M.
Townsend
What most people do not realize is that politics is the most important
profession in the land. Get this straight, I do not mean to demean the
medical, the ICT, the architectural or the rest of the noble
professions.
But just think of this: politicians make the laws on how we live and
lead our lives. Period. They determine how you live and breathe; where
you can work and live. They determine what sanction you get for
stealing a finger of banana or for sleeping with your friend's wife or
raping your neighbour's daughter, etc, etc. And if that's not serious
enough, they also determine what percentage of our income you and I
pay as taxes. And to round it up neatly, politicians are the only
people who can determine their own salaries! Let me know if you can
beat that. And what fantastic salaries they always vote for
themselves! And don't forget that when it comes to voting massive
emoluments for themselves, party rivalries miraculously vanish as our
politicians loot (literally and figuratively) the treasury.
We are HIPC (remember that word?), yet our politicians continue to
treat our treasury like a war booty that must be despoiled. The
Constitution prescribed for us an Executive Presidency. What our
politicians have managed to create was a Presidency almost imperial in
its opulence. Or would someone tell me what on earth our President
needs all those gleaming four-wheel jeeps in his entourage for!
Before you hang me, just be mindful of the simple fact that in the
Netherlands (one of the countries that 'donates' money to Ghana), the
leader of the country, that's the Prime minister, lives in his own
house and drives his own car. Each and every single member of the
Dutch Parliament lives in his\her house. And any Dutch MP who has an
urgent need for a car or a house doesn't bother the state with a
request for assistance - she goes to her bank and arranges things for
herself.
See, what I mean. The vast difference here is that in the Netherlands,
people go into politics to render a service. They mostly want to serve
their country and to give something back to the land of their birth.
In contrast, our politicians believe that their positions entitle them
to the best in the world and at the state's expense, of course!
"The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every
class is unfit to govern" - Lord Acton.
Look at the situation in our dear motherland. Not only do we house our
MPs, we also grant them car loans from our paltry resources. And our
Ministers are truly a class unto themselves. They not only get free
autos courtesy of the state, but we are also fueling the autos they
use mostly to chauffeur their girlfriends around. I say it is time a
serious political science Ph.D does her dissertation on what our
democracy in costing us.
But the main gripe here is why do we allow the politicians to get away
with it? If any other professional group has performed as abysmally as
our politicians, we all would be screaming blue murder and baying for
blood. The politicians' blood, I mean. Yes, our politicians have
treated us shabbily and with the utmost disdain, I tell the truth. But
here they are again baring their ivories and doing what they do best,
politicking, which, essentially, is lying through their teeth.
"No man (woman) undertakes a trade he has not learned, even the
meanest; yet every one thinks himself sufficiently qualified for the
hardest of all trades,-that of government. "- Socrates
Ok, let me bore you guys silly with some litanies of woes. Our dear
motherland, Ghana was conceived by the British intrigues to achieve
their imperial ambitions. When you sit down to think about it, you
will come to see that our beloved Ghana does not make logical,
cultural, geographic, historic... sense. The only logic binding was the
imperial logic of forcible acquisition. The British simply want it
that way and that was that. They ruled the waves the, didn't they! And
you do not argue with maxim machine guns, do you?
They colonized (or civilized, choose what you may) us for about a
century and handed our land back to us. Oh, I am jumping too fast
here. The true story is that many of our elite, especially those who
had the benefit of the white man's education decided that they have
had enough of been ruled by people who were not of their own kind.
They talked big grammar and threatened hell and brimstone. The
colonizer (or civilizer) threw some of them in jail and shot some of
the hoi polloi who protested too much. The blood of the patriots ran
on our sacred soil. Things got a bit out of control here and there.
The Germans waged and lost a second war (how silly could you be?).
Although the Allies won (with great unacknowledged contribution from
Africa), but in reality only the Americans won. The war effectively
bankrupted Ghana's self-styled mother country. Britain lost her Global
leadership to the Yankees. The Empire started crumbling. It was the
time for the Wind of Change when the colonials started gaining back
what the perfidious albion from that Isle of iniquities had illegally
taken from them.
Okay, enough history. Let's pick the thread of our story on our
politicians. Oh, the British handed power over to our folks in 1957,
making us the second country in Africa to gain our liberation. For
those interested in that sort of things, Sudan beat us by a year;
January 1, 1956 to be precise. Sudan is the largest country in Africa
and the name means: 'land of the blacks' (and why not show off a bit
while we are still at it?).
So folks, we have being ruling ourselves for more than half a century
and how have we fare? According to our politicians, we have never had
it so good. Life is so good here that those complaining urgently
require psychological (no, make that psychiatric) treatment. They,
politicians, and their media (it is no secret that politicians own the
majority of the media here, or is it? So much for objective
journalism!) are dazzling us with arrays of bewildering statistics
that purportedly shows how well we are doing as a nation and as a
people. Inflation, they tell us, is down and is well under control.
Jobs have been created and are available except for lazybones who have
been imbibing too much of the Ghana's contribution to world's
beverage. I am talking about akpeteshi. And food, oh, they are so
plentiful and affordable (tautological, since inflation has been wiped
out, food should be cheap).
But wait a mo, is this the reality we ordinary folks see? Are our
folks so mentally deranged that they prefer to sell Made-in-Indonesia
mosquito coils in scorching sun than to do the government-created
jobs? I do not know the answer to that one. I also do not understand
the arcane subject they call economics. And you can just forget
financial statistics; that's way, way beyond me. What is not beyond me
is this. No, I better show you a small figure and you can make up your
own mind whether or not the monster of inflation has been miraculously
wiped out from our dear land.
ITEM PRICE (2000) PRICE (2007)
Candle 250 1,200
Gari (per Olonka) 2,500 12,000
Maize (per bag) 50,000 250,000
Kerosene (per gallon) 5,000 28,900
Ga Kenkey 500 2,000
See, here I mention only the items that are of interest to the common
woman and money-challenged folks like me. Who, but the seriously rich,
is interested in the prices of milk, sugar, margarine and exotic
stuffs like those?
When you look at the figures, you do not need a Ph. D to know that
something is seriously amiss when. If an Olanka of Gari cost 2500cedis
in the year 2000 and cost 12,000cedis in 2007 and the politicians are
telling you and me that they have banished inflation from Ghana,
something certainly doesn't give. This is not hearsay, my friends. I
bought gari in 2,000 and I am still buying Gari today; so I know what
I'm talking about. The politicians are certainly telling lies when
they claimed to have tamed inflation. Inflation is well and alive, at
least at the markets where I buy my Gari. Perhaps the politicians have
created special market for themselves. There would be no surprises
there, either.
See, I do not like to be lied to. Which brings us to the question of
what I am going to do about it? And this brings us, in a roundabout
way, to the main reason for this article. I am as mad a hatter when I
see the sad parade of those clamoring to rule us spewing the same
verbiage (you can substitute garbage if you want) that they have being
spewing over the years. And their paid pals of the press are doing
what they do best - collecting their envelopes and writing their pure
fictions and befuddling us with their stupid lies.
Ok, we Ghanaians are not world champions when it comes to reading. And
it is true that many (I won't use most) of us simply go through life
without reading anything more serious than our lotto papers. But tell
me, how does a nation developed politically and socially and
economically without a quality press to keep those in power on their
toes? Most Ghanaian journalists seem totally unaware that it is the
job and the duty and the obligation of the writer to be the conscience
of her society. Otherwise, Ghanaian papers would not be so always full
of crappy, re-hashed stories about our politicians and their antics.
"Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors." -
Ralph Waldo Emerson.
And we as citizens also have obligations which does not begin and end
with our casting our votes on election days. Our most important
obligation is to leave our nation in better shape than we met it.
That's the sacred duty of every citizen of this land. And why is that
so important? No, no, it is not for purely altruistic reasons.
Actually, it is for very selfish reasons. Oh, Oh! Ah, Ah!
Let me explain. You love your children, don't you? Is it not your wish
to leave them in better situation than you live? I'm assuming that
you're a caring parent. You want your child to be better than you. You
want her to have better education than you; a better living standard,
let us say. You went through life in great hardship, waging constant
battle in order to scrap a miserable existence out of life. You live
in a roaches-infested, mosquito-overwhelmed room unfit for pets in
some countries, from which the land-lord (sorry, slumlord) is
constantly treating to eject you. You never ride a decent car in your
life; you always travel in the scrap of heaps we called trotro. You
never in your life drank from a tap water and electricity is something
you glance from afar. That certainly is not the life you want your
child to live in, is it now? So what the hell, I ask again, are you
doing about it?
That is, of course, the biggest problem. Everyone recognizes the
problem. But hardly anyone is doing something to fix it. That
precisely is why the politicians are taking us for sweet rides, year
in year out. They knew that we do not care enough to even be
apathetic. They know and we know that most of us go through life
without the thought of leaving it in better shape than we met it. Now
you know why they always take us for granted. No, I'm not telling you
anything new. You just haven't taken the time and the trouble to sit
down and try to figure things out. See what I mean?
Ghana will be better when all of us start to take our civic
responsibilities seriously. We should start by compelling those
aspiring to rule (and Lord over us) to start by providing us with
detailed plans of what they intend to do for the nation when elected.
Hell no, I am not talking about some canned party manifesto of obscure
origin and of zero knowledge value.
No, in this age of internet and broadband (you see that I also know
the lingo), those aspiring to rule us should be able to assemble
competent specialists in various field who can help them create
detailed position papers which you and I can access on their websites.
If they can donate nine figures to their parties, they should be able
to organize something for the specialists, so that we voters can
better understand where they are coming from and where they are going.
No, I do not mean the sad charade they called presidential debates.
Specifically, anyone aspiring to the presidency of this country should
have detailed position papers on:
1. Education - This I believe to be the most important issue facing
us. I see no reason why Ghana cannot provide free and good quality
education for all her children. In this globalised world, knowledge
(acquired through education) is all that makes all the difference. It
is what separate the men from the boys; the first world from the third
world. You can have all the resources in the world, but without the
knowledge to transform them, you will remain a sad loser. Just ask our
cousins in Nigeria. To be honest, even if we spend eighty percent of
our budget educating our children, it'd be good investment.
2. Health. Health they say is wealth. I guess that kinda said it all.
3. Agriculture. You need men and women with food in their stomachs in
order to run a healthy nation and economy. There is absolutely no
reason for us, after fifty year of self-government to still be
importing British mad-cow diseased beef and rice from Thailand
4. Regional integration and African unity - Get off the high horse. In
this age and time, Ghana cannot go it alone. We need ECOWAS and we
need the AU. The Big boys in Europe are expanding their EU at a pace
that will make you dizzy. The Asians are also doing it. Pan-Africanism
is no longer a romantic dream of the Nkrumahs; the very survival of
Africa depends on it, lest the imperialists continue their rapacious
rape of our land and resources! Our nation should join others in the
West African sub region to develop a common electricity, postal,
communication and defence infrastructures.
5. Security - Honestly I do not know why I put this at numero 5.
Security is all-encompassing and all-important and should have been up
there at the top.
So fellow citizens, this is my wish list. You may add yours if you so
desire. What we should do is to make sure that every man and woman who
aspires to the presidency of our republic has detailed position papers
on all the points. The bargain here is that we give our votes to the
one whose position papers seem the most reasonable. Of course,
politicians, being who they are, can lie through it. But that's where
a simple logic comes in.
There would (no, make that will) be an election at the end of a four
year term, won't there be? The situation we have today is that any
jackass can come to our ghetto and promise to build a bridge from Tema
to Navrongo; put a TV, Fridge in every home plus a car to complete
things and we shall give him our votes and get zilch in return. The
SOB will swindle us big time and think nothing of coming back next
time to canvass our votes. It has happened before, hadn't it? Actually
it had happen several times.
So, you see if we have a candidate detailed plan, we can always take
him on the concrete things he promised to accomplish. So, how is this
going to settle our under-developmental challenges? Actually, I really
do not know and I don't believe that I said that it would. However,
what we can do is this: we can rush to our internet caf