By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
June 27, 2015
E-mail: [email protected]
Mr. Emmanuel Kyerematen-Agyarko, the New Patriotic Party's Member of Parliament for Ayawaso-West Wuogon, is quite right that Mayor Alfred Oko Vanderpuije ought to resign if he firmly believes that he has failed (See "If You've Failed, Resign - MP Charges Mayor" MyJoyOnline.com / Ghanaweb.com 6/8/15). The fact of the matter is that it is not only Dr. Vanderpuije who has failed in the performance of his comfortably salaried duties. The entire cross-partisan government of Ghana has failed. To be certain, Mayor Vanderpuije is all the more courageous for admitting the obvious, even as Mr. Kyerematen-Agyarko rightly points out. But the Accra mayor can readily get away with such cheap and tawdry rhetoric, because there is no precedent of any of his predecessors having honestly acknowledged his/her failure, and then having taken the even more courageous step of promptly resigning.
I am also quite certain that the same flash-flood problem that turned Accra into a living nightmare on June 3 and 4 existed under the Kufuor-led government of the New Patriotic Party. And at the time, I am also quite certain that Mr. Kyerematen-Agyarko had not called on the extant Accra mayor to resign his post. We could even push the temporal post even further backwards to include the Rawlings-led government of the National Democratic Congress (NDC). The warped logic here is that unless a clearly failed mayor puts such failure into words, somehow, that grossly incompetent metropolitan administrator can keep his job - in other words, it is the mere public expression of regret and remorse that makes the crime what it irrefutably is. Needless to say, no logic could be more preposterous.
Indeed, it is no secret that both critic and the damned are prominent political denizens of the nation's capital who drive to work through the streets of Accra every day, and could both have anticipated this problem well in advance and come up with an effective and/or constructive solution. Mr. Kyerematen-Agyarko can simply not wave off this mess as one that exclusively falls within the purview or jurisdiction of Mayor Vanderpuije. It is the collective responsiblity of everybody profitably engaged in the business of government, either as an administrator or lawmaker. In sum, Mr. Kyerematen-Agyarko could have tabled a motion with the Speaker of Parliament, once he realized that another catastrophic flash-flood was about to ravage our nation's capital which demanded prompt and serious attention from the entire top-leadership of Ghana.
I am also quite certain that unlike what the Ayawaso-West Wuogon NPP-MP would have the rest of the nation believe, Mayor Vanderpuije is a man of conscience, assuming, of course, that there are any men and women of conviction left on Ghana's political landscape today. But his conscience is only as deep and sound as that of politicians like Mr. Kyerematen-Agyarko. Well, there is a quite interesting development on the nation's political skyline; and it has to do with accusations being traded between Mayor Vanderpuije and Mr. Seth Terkper, the Finance Minister. Mayor Vanderpuije claims that but for the epic failure of Mr. Terkper to release funding, storm drains for whose woeful lack the June 3 and 4 disaster erupted would have been constructed well in advance to drastically reduce the devastating impact of the fiery flood that took the lives of more than 200 people at the last count.
In response, Mr. Terkper claims that the Accra mayor had woefully failed to fully complete some paper work needed before the release of funding for the construction of the storm drains. At any rate, Mr. Terkper adds that even if Mayor Vanderpuije had completed and submitted the aforesaid documents to him on schedule, funding could still not have been available, because the bank responsible for releasing such funding had failed to do so. The Finance Minister, however, does not tell us why the lender had not promptly met his/her side of the contractual agreement. And we really don't need much speculation to draw the most logical conclusions.
Should have, could have, what is patently clear here is that the entire leadership chain, beginning with the Flagstaff House, or the Presidency, had hopelessly broken down sometime between the occurrence of the last major inundation of our nation's capital and the most recent one. And so the question to ask right now is as follows: Dead Dog, Na who cause am?
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