Who Is This NDC Hack Trying To Fool?

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

He once e-mailed to tell me that his 12-year-old son was far more intelligent than I. And so it is quite obvious that Nii Amasah Namoale thinks very highly of himself and his mischievous opinions. Back then, he was the deputy minister for fisheries, or some such fishy department of government, under the late President John Evans Atta-Mills. I don't quite remember what subject of my column to which this godforsaken wretch was responding. Perhaps it was about some dastardly allegation about a long-deceased judge having made payolas a central aspect of his rulings by some notorious shyster attorney members of the National Democratic Congress' legal team.

What I vividly remember is the response that I fired off to him. I tersely advised Mr. Amasah Namoale to clear off and instead thank his stars for being so bizarrely privileged as to be appointed to the plum sinecure of an executive second-bananas, because far more intelligent Ghanaians, such as yours truly, gave up on Ghanaian politics as soon as Mr. Amasah Namoale's godfather, Mr. Jerry John Rawlings, brought the threshold of the qualities and qualifications of a politician as nauseatingly and abysmally low as it is presently.

And so I am not the least bit surprised that the National Democratic Congress' Member of Parliament for Dade-Kotopon Constituency, in the Greater-Accra Region, should be calling for the immediate suspension of the Single-Spine Salary Structure, on the superficially quite logical grounds that the government has been collecting far less revenue than it presently pays out to its employees (See "NDC MP: Single Spine Should Be Suspended" Peacefmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 12/20/13)

A really intelligent politician, it goes without saying, would rather be calling for the immediate proscription - or cessation - of the patently criminal quadrennial gratuity packages offered woefully underemployed parliamentarians like Mr. Amasah Namoale by themselves. Indeed, if the Single-Spine Salary Structure appears to be giving the Mahama government a lot of headache, it is primarily because our executive operatives are obscenely overpaid. And on the latter score, let no reader or critic write to yours truly pointlessly bitching about how exceptionally progressive President Mahama's recent self-congratulatory edict calling for a 10-percent reduction in the salaries of cabinet appointees and their deputies is.

In other words, rather than lamely and so childishly faulting the Single-Spine Salary Structure for exacerbating the country's economic woes, let our MPs and Ministers of State begin living on the same salary scales as our teachers, doctors and all the other civil servants and see whether the SSSS would not become very manageable. It is also rather scandalous to learn that as of yet, nearly 100 foreign-trained medical practitioners have not been paid their full salaries and professional benefits, more than a year after they were officially hired and inducted into their various sub-specialties.

Is such travesty being perpetrated by the same Mahama government that was eager to import several hundred Cuban doctors to replace striking Ghanaian doctors not quite awhile ago? Then also, another simple and sensible way of freeing up enough funding for such critical state services as the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), the so-called Common Fund and GetFund, is for government officials to stop living lavishly and wastefully like Neo-British Colonial Administrators. For instance, I was recently stunned to hear one of the Ayariga brothers, the one on the staff of President Mahama, impishly pat himself on the back and brag about the fact that he was paying his own utility bills as his "yeomanly contribution to our national development" efforts.

And you thought all these GYEEDA, SADA and Woyome capers were the anomalies in our fetid culture of rank corruption, naked theft and the wanton pillaging of our national coffers.

_____________________________________________________________ *Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D. Department of English Nassau Community College of SUNY Garden City, New York Dec. 20, 2013 E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net ###