for Parliament-Exactly!

By Kobena Eyiah Antobam

That our politicians have denied us that law for the past thirty years is most galling! Mr. Cletus Avoka is on record as stating seriously that it is not a priority for Parliament! This is an insult to the people of Ghana and a betrayal of the trust reposed in their representatives. Sydney Casely-Hayford.

“I think we need a review of our current constitution so as to redefine clearly the powers, functions and roles of the judiciary, executive and legislature.” Kwesi Atta Sekyi

“Corruption has taken a pathological root in our society, and even our conscience can be bought for peanut. All our leaders have been marinated and stewed in it and no one can claim any higher moral ground. No Ghanaian with conscience should lift a voice of protest for any political party when the verdict is announced. They run the government for their selfish interest, and they are not worth dying for”. Philip Kobina Naidoo Jr.

Introduction John Patterson said, ‘Only fools and dead men don’t change…Fools won’t, and dead men can’t.’ There is no doubt about the fact that our dear country Ghana is a near basket case. The above quotations come from three chilling pieces that I have read on Ghanaweb in the past two weeks. My namesake Kobina Baidoo seems to have thrown his hands up, as many Ghanaians I meet in different parts of the United Kingdom, seem to have done. But a few days ago, I was reminded by another columnist, one Kwaku Adu-Gyamfi that Ghana is all we have and all of us who have a stake in the fortunes of the country need to begin to think and behave differently.

We have allowed our politicians to cast a pall of darkness on our country with a six foot wall around it so they can suck it dry in the darkness, just as the PNDC put the nation to bed at gun point and robbed it senseless. If anyone needs proof of that, after the presidential inauguration on January 7, 2001, it was reported that a whopping three trillion cedis had vanished from state coffers without trace! That has been the trend ever since, although the quantum of theft has differed from one administration to the next, the effect has been the same, rape of Mother Ghana by every departing administration. NYEP, as the draft report of GYEEDA has shown, was born with glaring loopholes for the sole purpose of siphoning money by cronies, and those who nurtured it as GYEEDA have done so with relish. On another level, how many trains, trams and buses did the Presidency of Ghana buy for the ordinary suffering people of Ghana in 2012 to overspend its budget by 600 million?

The consequences Our so-called leaders have intentionally destroyed our education system to dumb down Ghanaian society so they can use us for their selfish ends. Through the sheer weight of their “brown envelopes” and evil connections, they are able to educate their children in the best private schools, with personal tuition at home thrown in, while they look on as the state system rots away. Even after all that, when their wards fail miserably, they still resort to “protocol admissions” to sneak their children through to the best high schools. Then there is the Scholarship Secretariat and now Ghana Education Trust Fund, which spirit away their children into foreign universities and colleges. The more astute ones get their benefactors (they are the only ones who have rich friends) and international rogue companies like Mabey and Johnson, to pay their children’s school fees.

All over Europe and North America, there are “visa colleges” and backroom private universities that will take students’ tuition fees no matter how dumb they are, as long as they pay their school fees regularly and on time. At the end of it all they hand their victims some worthless pieces of paper that dogs wouldn’t bark at in Europe, but still qualify them for plum jobs in Ghana, courtesy their corrupt fathers.

Meanwhile the “remnants” of the system that have no chance in hell of ever getting a vocation, let alone a decent job, have been given fancy names like foot soldiers, serial callers, grassroots, etc, so they can do the bidding of their masters. Some of the relatively smart ones within this cannon fodder see opportunities in seizing public toilets markets and lorry parks, so they can make a few cedis while the sun still shines. Most don’t even see the gloomy future that awaits them in old age, and just continue to make a nuisance of themselves within their local communities. “He who knows not and knows not that he knows not…..”

Come election time, our politicians suddenly realise that they have constituents. They come with their chamber pots, bowls of rice, millet and a few tins of long expired sardines and milk, balls of kenkey, local gin and a handful of cedis, to give to their fodder to go and bash the heads of their own classmates, former girlfriends and their parents and presto, there is absolute mayhem for the following few days and weeks. Are these parasites really worth dying for?

Solution Kwesi, Sydney, Kobina, your diagnoses are spot on. The prescription is to disrobe our country of its pall of darkness by throwing a bright light on Mother Ghana so we can all see clearly whatever goes into or comes out of her. “A Freedom of Information Bill (FOIB) is not the priority of Parliament-exactly! How else could all the current stinky sleaze continue? Mr. Cletus Avoka is spot on because I can bet my bottom penny that if you travelled through his constituency and asked one thousand people about Freedom of Information, nine hundred and ninety of them would not know what animal it is. In fact just as the barely literate ones tend to do on Ghanaweb, even those ten that have ever heard of FOIB will brand you “too known.”

They will never give it to us unless we compel them to. Most of our print and electronic media practitioners are not interested either. As Justice Dotse rightly pointed out, they are more interested in useless things, emphasizing the insults, innuendoes and plain faced lies that politicians tell about each other. Ama Benyiwa-Doe and Victor Smith admitted at their vetting that they had lied about former President Kufuor and still got the nod. Not surprisingly, they both had nothing to show for their tenures. They went to regions where whole districts were registering zero percent at basic education level and when they left, districts were still registering zero percent.

We need a crusade to get an FOIB passed by Parliament. We need to inundate our Parliamentarians’ letter and email boxes with hundreds of mails every day until an FOIB is passed. Let us send them texts, meet them on Facebook and Twitter. Let us monitor and catalogue their every comment, speech or insult. They will come in handy at election time. Anyone who makes a “Ghana-phobic” or FOIB-phobic comment will be a target at election time. We need to let their constituents know how shallow and very ‘anti-Ghana’ their MPs are.

We have to know what office holders come into office with in terms of personal worth, so we can all determine after their tenure of office whether they have fleeced Mother Ghana or not. Yes, Kwaku, you are right, Ghana is all we have. We need to throw the die one more time before we throw in the towel. We owe it to our brothers and sisters in the countryside. We owe it to those who lost their lives, those whose youth was wasted in dungeons, those whose businesses were destroyed without reason. Above all, we owe it to generations unborn.

Kwaku, Kwesi, Kobina, Sydney, Prof Lungu, are you ready?