A Mayor In The Circus

Accra Mayor Alfred Vanderpuye’s theatricals, last Thursday, were more of a nuisance than an effort at arresting an aspect of corruption pervading the country.

His action was as weird as it was an infringement upon the rights of a building inspector who has not yet been convicted by a court of law in a country where the rule of law is supposed to be in vogue.

He invited a plethora of personalities, some of them policemen and officials of the Accra Metropolitan Assembly (AMA), not forgetting the media, to what can derisively be regarded as a display of buffoonery.

Just why the mayor of the nation’s capital would take the law into his hands and order the police to humiliate a man whose complicity in the collapsed Melcom building is yet to be established is beyond our ken.

Alfred Vanderpuye’s eccentric conduct did not start last Thursday. He is fond of taking knee-jerk actions when faced with stressful moments. After he clashed with the owner of the building under the cameras, he appears to be desperately struggling to catch the eye of the President, a man he has not worked with as much as he did the former President John Evans Atta Mills.

For a man who lived and worked in the US for a long time, where the rule of law operates, we would have expected a better conduct from him. His irrational conduct when he ordered a policeman to handcuff the building inspector, who is yet to make a single appearance before a court of law, is despicable and condemnable.

This is one man who vowed to rid the streets of Accra of hawkers. At the time, he virtually paced the streets of Accra, demolishing every structure he beheld and decided, unilaterally, was on a waterway. As for the street hawkers, he literally cleared them from the way in a nine-day wonder show. We said he would stay action and the hawkers would return with a vengeance.

We are confident that the ‘eye-service’ he is putting up, as he sets his sight on buildings in Accra, like the stayed action on street hawkers, would suffer a lull.

We can state confidently that Mayor Alfred Vanderpuye knows too well about the corruption under his nose but has failed to do anything to manage it. For him to want to use the poor building inspector as a scapegoat because trouble has struck is inappropriate, crude, unacceptable and unbecoming of a mayor, who has the advantage of experiencing best practices in advanced democracies.