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Opinions of Wednesday, 13 February 2008

Columnist: Otoo, Ben

Kufour, Stop Using Children To Stage-Mabage Your NPP Campaigns

No! No!! NO!!! God, please, save Ghana from this Kufour man and those campaigning that they will continue his good works.

Kufour had the guts to unashamedly bundle 30 poor and hungry Ghanaian children onto an aircraft and paid US$1 500 excluding hotel bills and per diem for each of them to appear before a packed hall of World Food Programme officials in Italy for them to tell the world that the food they eat at school by the kind courtesy of the School Feeding Programme is better than what their parents give them at home and so on.

Doesn?t the WFP have an office in Accra which can conduct its own research to ascertain the exact outcome of the School Feeding Programme?

Does it have to take the Ghanaian President and his yes-men to go around Ghana to handpick school children of his party?s ?foot soldiers? to stage-manage an important programme like?

Is the case that the food these children eat at school as a result of the School Feeding Programme is better than what their parents provide for them at home? Does that not imply that the ordinary Ghanaian in the street is so impoverished that a feeding programme which serves the lowest quality of food one can find on the Ghanaian market serves what is better than parents can afford to give their children at home?

If Ghana?s economy is doing well as the Breton wood institutions are claiming, why can?t parents feed their own children?

The International Labour Organization will soon be having its session on child prostitution and child labour, and Ghana is known to have one of the highest rates of child labour and child prostitution (Aremeyaw?s recent rigorous investigative journalism exposed all of that) in Sub-Saharan Africa. Will the President bundle some of these children, too, onto an aircraft and transport them to Switzerland to tell their stories?

Kufour, you can even go on now and bundle all the Kayaye?s below 14 years with children who are sleeping rough in the open in Accra and offer them rooms in Hotel Kufour and showcase that to the world, but now Ghanaians know all your tricks. You simply can no longer use the colonizer who is still lurking around in the dark alleys waiting for the least opportunity to devour us to validate your lies as the truth.

God will surely save Ghana from all this ?enim guasi? come December 2008.

Ben Otoo

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