Opinions of Friday, 13 July 2007
Columnist: Okoampa-Ahoofe, Kwame
'General Mosquito,' Cry Your Own Cry!!!
On June 28, 2007, a Ghanaweb.com reprinted article from the Daily Dispatch newspaper, attributed the following statement to the General Secretary of the so-called National Democratic Congress (NDC): “Power is slipping from the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP). It cannot win the 2008 Presidential and Parliamentary elections. Majority of Ghanaians are poorer now, a few Ghanaians are better off now.”
It goes absolutely without saying that the preceding remark encapsulates the wishful thinking of a desperately power-hungry man poised to scamming the Ghanaian electorate again with his dubious claim to Social Democratic ideology.
Indeed, were Mr. Johnson Asiedu Nketia certain of what he was talking about, “General Mosquito,” as he is popularly known, would have presented his audience with statistical evidence indicating exactly how much ground the tyrannical National Democratic Congress has gained on or at the expense of the ruling New Patriotic Party. He would also have told his audience exactly how many ordinary Ghanaians were assisted by the government of the National Democratic Congress to fly their children and relatives abroad for tertiary education, as well as other advanced studies, as Mr. and Mrs. Rawlings were able to do, even as the bloody pair and their accomplices literally bankrupted the country’s higher educational institutions.
In any case, for anybody to get a striking sense of the jitters in which the NDC constabulary find themselves, one only needs to recall what happened on June 4, 2007, when the entire NDC hierarchy converged on Somanya and rather than proudly and confidently enumerate their past achievements, relative to those of the ruling New Patriotic Party, Messrs. Rawlings, E. T. Mensah, Tony Aidoo and Toy-Soldier, among others, proceeded to call out retired soldiers and other yesteryear’s grossly misguided supporters of the former Air Force pilot to prepare themselves to launch a full-scale assault on the ruling New Patriotic Party.
Couple the foregoing with the fact that any celebrations of June 4th and December 31st have long since been proscribed by the Supreme Court of Ghana as well as the Ghana National Assembly, and it immediately becomes eerily evident just what caliber of humanity constitutes the so-called National Democratic Congress.
Needless to say, the NDC has lost virtually every by-election which it contested against the NPP, and so if “General Mosquito” and his fellow gangsters understood, or even marginally appreciated, anything about the pulse of the Ghanaian electorate, they would rather have been hunched over their strategic drawing-board, that is if they have one, fervidly strategizing on how to reverse the overwhelmingly negative public opinion against these career rabble-rousers and perennial parliamentary boycotters.
And when he risibly claims that “the NPP thinks that economic growth is equivalent to economic development. We disagree with them on this major economic issue,” Mr. Asiedu Nketia is actually quoting Mrs. Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings, who recently told a Kumasi gathering of her so-called 31st December Women’s Movement that the very World Bank which her own husband had denounced as an imperialist cannibal had, indeed, commended her husband’s mal-administration for having registered a 5-percent economic growth rate during the two decades that the P/NDC held Ghanaians hostage.
Needless to say, those of us who have long-term memory banks fully appreciate the stark difference between the Cash-and-Carry health policy instituted by the NDC which, in effect, told poor and elderly Ghanaians to self-medicate or die avoidable deaths – even as the likes of Messrs. Asiedu Nketia and the Rawlingses routinely traveled abroad for medical check-ups – and the people-sensitive and civilized policy of the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) established by the Kufuor-led government of the New Patriotic Party. And while our public hospitals and health centers may, indeed, not be exactly first-class in quality or service delivery, nevertheless, most Ghanaians remember the days, less than a decade ago, when our ambulances largely ferried dead bodies, rather than the indisposed, and our public hospitals and health centers merely functioned as mortuaries. But, of course, you can afford to insult the intelligence of the Ghanaian electorate if you call yourself “General Mosquito.” For after all, don’t we all know too well the deadly havoc wreaked on Ghanaians by those “Malarial Vectors” or carriers of the so-called National Democratic Congress?
And just what does “General Mosquito” mean by the following quote attributed to him: “The top 20 percent of the population have grown far richer in the NPP era and the bottom 50 percent have become poorer in the NPP era. When you share their riches among the population and you come out with per capita income, it turns [sic] to cover the real picture on the ground”?
Needless to say, in terms of wealth sharing and access to such essential public facilities as health and education, the NDC remains, literally, in the Stone Age. For while the P/NDC made a staple diet of perennially shutting down our universities and colleges, not only did the NPP government keep the same wide-open all-year-round, it also introduced free meals to our elementary-school children, Ghana’s leaders of tomorrow. And except for NDC apparatchiks like Mr. Asiedu Nketia, who doesn’t know that a well-fed pupil is the equivalent of a nation well-prepared for the humongous challenges of a brave, new Internet-technology world? And what of free-busing for our schoolchildren? Tantamount to the NPP making the poor poorer and the rich richer? A screaming joke that you veritably are, “General Mosquito,” were you to ask me!
Views expressed by the author(s) do not necessarily reflect those of GhanaHomePage.
