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Opinions of Thursday, 9 January 2020

Columnist: Isaac Ato Mensah

Rapping for Dominic Cummings

Dominic Cummings Dominic Cummings

Dominic Cummings, the chief advisor to PM Boris Johnson has published an advertisement for positions available in the Johnson administration following their recent landslide victory.

He is looking specifically for “data scientists, project managers, policy experts and assorted weirdos”.

And this is where I fit in as a well recognized weirdo.

An interesting criterion is that Cummings’s future personal assistant will work at such odd hours that “frankly it will [be] hard having a boy/girlfriend at all”– no, please do not read any further meaning into it yet.

On 2 January, Rajeev Syval, writing on theguardian.com, the same day the advertisement was published on dominiccumings.com, described it as “rambling”- noise.

But we at writersghana.com on 3 January called it “rumbling” as in thought provoking.

For, today, Ghana has been debased through sycophancy, chronic underachievement, charlatanism or kuluulu in both high and low places, and a resort to a dodgy theology that justifies mediocrity and at the same time atones for same and outright thuggery.

Who would you rather prefer to work with:
a) Dominic Cummings who advises “a new government with a significant majority and little need to worry about short-term unpopularity while trying to make rapid progress with long-term problems” or
b) our ghanaian poliTRIKcians messing up our Free Secondary Education programme – a constitutional/moral mandate – with an unwieldy azonto “Double Track” school “semester” system?

The fact is seventy five percent of the citizens want to travel and live in another country.

That includes me; I want to go to “Rotterdam or anywhere…..Liverpool or Rome…anywhere alone” – far, far away from the congenital sycophants, myrmidons, rent seekers, chancers and the cognitively challenged.

So here goes my Sakabo rap for Dominic Cummings.

Post Office Box MP3503
Accra
Ghana

3 January, 2020

Mr. Dominic Cummings
SW1
London
United Kingdom

Dear Mr. Cummings,

APPLICATION AS A MISFIT IN THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT.

I write formally to respectfully tender my application for the job category of “Weirdos and misfits with odd skills” in PM Boris Johnson’s government as per your advertisement on dominiccummings.com dated January 2, 2020.

My parents were once British subjects.
I know I can provide a novel and useful perspective on foreign policy.

You will get to hear true “weirdo” stuff – stuff that needs to be heard and taken on board at SW1.

When it comes to “true cognitive diversity” I am not just “blabbing” about a multiracial “identity”; I am the real deal, a scion of former British subjects and a denizen of quite a few British quirks such as blue blazers, yellow ties, mash and wry humor.

At the same time, a true connoisseur of banku, palm oil, tilapia, pito and bush meat.

To date I love queuing at embassies for visas and answering dumb questions.

I have been offering a regularly published “moral and intellectual guide” to the whole world on my home-grown peer-reviewed blog available at writersghana.com.

There are over 200 posts for your reading pleasure – and deep contemplation.

It will certainly help you decipher some of my odd skills.

My most important antecedent is that I am an alumnus of Sakabo University, Blebo We- Sakumo, Tema, where I was privileged to be tutored in all things disruptive by the Mad Dog – whose late mother assured the whole world that there is truly method to his madness.

Now let us see how outlandish you really want to be; I await your call.

Yours faithfully,

(Signed)
Isaac Ato Mensah
Certified Weirdo

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