Former President John Dramani Mahama
He is the only one who knows what was “pearly” about the grossly incompetent leadership of former President John Dramani Mahama, to have the chutzpah to smugly presume to insult the intelligence of the Ghanaian voter, by imperiously claiming that the latter made an unwise decision to fire the unarguably most arrogant of all democratically elected postcolonial Ghanaian leaders from the Jubilee-Flagstaff House.
Maybe the National Democratic Congress’ Member of Parliament for Wa-Central sees something that the rest of us Ghanaian citizens are rather too slow to have recognized in the indescribably scandalous Mahama-led government of the National Democratic Congress (NDC).
I also believe in the practically sound concept of the proverbial wheel-of-fortune; which means that it is all too natural and logical for anybody to accept the fact that no position of power or political influence is permanent, and that just as the erstwhile Mahama government was so decisively swept off the country’s political terrain, the Akufo-Addo-led New Patriotic Party (NPP) Administration shall not remain in the Jubilee-Flagstaff House in perpetuity. But, of course, it will not be anytime soon, seeing the level of untold suffering and raw and gross abuse Ghanaian citizens and voters endured under both the Mahama government and the two previous NDC-run regimes.
Under President Mahama, for example, Ghanaians were told that only citizens who had once occupied the presidency had the right and moral authority to criticize the former Rawlings Communications Minister. And under Rawlings, merely criticizing the president in public, without even the physical presence of the longtime chairman of the erstwhile Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) and the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), could land the critic in jail. Are these the sort of arrogant and insufferably disdainful and immitigably reprobate characters that Mr. Rashid Pelpuo would have the rest of us envisage to have been the best and most responsible Fourth Republican Ghanaian leaders?
We must also highlight the fact that at the last most reliable and authoritative count by Mr. Maurice Ampaw, the hard-driving and astute lawyer-political activist, a humongous 80-percent of all cabinet appointees of President Mahama’s were graduate students, in various stages of progress, at the various tertiary institutions in the country. Is this the mark of the leadership competence that the Wa-Central NDC-MP would have the rest of the world believe Ghanaians made the most egregious error in judgment by so resoundingly ousting in the December 7, 2016 polls?
As Minister for Public-Private Partnerships under the democratically ousted Mahama regime, in perhaps the most scientifically accurate polling coup d’état of its kind anywhere in the civilized world, Mr. Pelpuo himself has a lot of explaining to do, particularly regarding how under his watch, the country’s economy literally ground to a screeching halt.
Indeed, even as I write this column, the National Democratic Congress’ parliamentary minority just voted to elect Mr. Haruna Iddrisu, the former Minister of Labor and Employment as its leader. For those of our readers who may not know him, Mr. Iddrisu is the notorious and shameless plagiarist who had his Master’s degree, in one of the social sciences, stripped from him by the Academic Council of the country’s flagship academy, the University of Ghana.
In an advanced and highly respectable democratic nation, Mr. Iddrisu would not be permitted to hold any sensitive position of public trust. Today, Mr. Iddrisu also holds a law degree from one of the non-mainstream law schools in the country, and we just don’t know yet precisely how he obtained his law degree and, even more significantly, how he managed to pass his bar exam in order to secure his license to practice law.
Then, there is also this vacuous talk about the Mahama-led NDC government’s having produced an overabundance of infrastructural facilities in the country. I am quite certain that a close scrutiny of this public policy vaunt would bear out something quite different from the reality on the ground.
But, of course, what these corrupt and cynical NDC apparatchiks conveniently fail to underscore is the very fundamental fact that sheer infrastructural facilities uncoupled by the necessary human resource development, is as good as none. A simple explanation is akin to putting up a lot of school buildings without providing prospective students any furniture or textbooks and the necessary learning and teaching tools. Needless to say, the primary beneficiaries of these infrastructural facilities were these politicians themselves!
We must also promptly highlight the fact that between 2012 and 2016, more than 50-percent of all small businesses in the country went under or out of operation primarily because of chronic and perennial energy shortages. I also don’t suppose that the smug likes of Mr. Pelpuo think that Ghanaians are, somehow, too unsophisticated to fully appreciate the fact that in terms of economic development, regular and reliable energy supply is the most basic of infrastructural facilities.
That it took the proximal approach of Election 2016 for the Mahama government to seriously attempt to tackle the “Dumsor” crisis, should tell every well-meaning and forward-thinking Ghanaian citizen just how lowly the leaders of the Mahama government thought of them. “A political pearl of Ghana,” indeed, Mr. Pelpuo.