Opinions of Monday, 20 June 2016
Columnist: Kwasi Ansu-Kyeremeh
I thought I was going to shock my physician by telling her that candlelight (they call it mobile phone torchlight these days) was used in airport arrival transactions. But to my surprise, it sounded like some trivial to her. It was no big deal to her because the mobile phone torch was the source of light at the operating theatre anytime almighty ECG, giver of light made by humankind, took it away.
And so in the motherland’s leading hospital, it is mobile phone bobo light which supplies emergency light when dums? strikes in the middle of operating on a compatriot. So it has come to all that. And leaders are still able to beat their chest and lay claim to achievement.
Bobo light for the theatre fate awaits the hospital perched on one of the capital’s ridges. So much has been made of building it. Completion is out of the question. They will not because they don’t intend to. Contract procurement has been one of the most chop chopping strategies, judgment debt payments having been the beginning point.
They like to shout loudly that they are building regional hospital this and district hospital that. As for CHPS compounds, they have built one everywhere with their mouths. Our own, the one our community started and has been operating in a rented premises, has been completely overlooked. Not long ago, our electricity bill was GHC2,000. We are still struggling to defray it.
Listening to news these days in the motherland is heart wrenching because the congress lying machine is constantly trumpeting ‘achievements.’ As a taxi driver drove me past the Kufuor As?k?re Mamp?ng affordable cost housing project site, the most appropriate descriptive word we both found was abor?. It appeared beyond comprehension that a project at that level would be abandoned uncompleted. The scene of a project which could easily have been completed over four years, but still sits abandoned, just hurts.
Uncompleted Kufuor affordable housing units litter the motherland. They were there before congress went throwing scarce motherland money into an STX wild goose chase for housing units.
They spoke and wrote big English ‘housing deficit,’ spoke and wrote it without action but with national embarrassment, the one thing they know not and care not about.
They say they are a government of the youth. The truth is that they are an incompetent government of the inexperienced, ignorant and immature creators of loot which they share among themselves.
They like to blasphemously use Kwame Nkrumah as their reference point. If they weren’t a bunch of ignoramuses, they would know Kwame Nkrumah’s projects were a mix of infrastructure and factories to create jobs. He did not spend eight years to develop infrastructure and later create jobs.
. Nkrumah had some less than 15 years to do all the things congress wants to talk about. Congress has so far had 19 plus 8 plus another 8. That is a total of 35 years. Why the PNC and PPP which claim the Nkrumah legacy are quietly complicit in the congress denigration of his name and work, only they understand.
Congress can change Jubilee House to Flagstaff House. They can change Ohene Djan Stadium to Accra Sports Stadium. But they are happy with the gateway airport of the motherland bearing the name of the man who destroyed Nkrumah and all his good work.
A wise mind would think for a mouth to say: that sounds very much politics without scruples.
The net gain, actually loss, of all the congress ‘we are building’ is a hefty over 74% GDP debt burden regime leftover for posterity. It is their legacy for the youth of today who have no jobs, and will never have jobs for as long as congress is in control of the motherland’s destiny.
Congress lives by procurement bribery. No school statutory payments; yet there is money to procure buses. Bribe chiefs with four-wheelers in 2012; buses for schools in 2016. Procurement is congress stealing strategy. Their interest in awarding bus procurement contract supersedes interest in whether they will be operational or not. They won’t pay feeding grants to the extent of closing disabled schools.
They govern by using all the people’s money to procure and then strategically bribe some of the people with the procured.
Dums? has been fixed; so now, it is dums?. When I wrote he who knows not how to manage problems cannot fix effective supply and distribution of electricity, I knew what could be expected of one who cannot manage but claims fixing knowhow.
Congress joins to sing and dance to: ‘Congress we build to steal from the state so we can build our own. We are of congress; we work to move forward never, backwards ever.’