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

I just finished reading the rejoinder of the ruling National Democratic Congress’ American branch to the opposition New Patriotic Party’s United States branch with quite an amusement. As usual, I had to begin reading from the penultimate paragraph of the rejoinder which was signed by NDC-USA General-Secretary Mr. Osborne K. Sam. At best the NDC-USA rejoinder could be characterized as deftly sophistic, for it shamelessly but ineffectively seeks to throw dust into the eyes of both unsuspecting and open-minded readers.

For instance, Mr. Sam claims that the Atta-Mills government has initiated a pupil-oriented policy under which “free textbooks and exercise books” will be supplied to “underprivileged children,” as well as “free uniform materials” for the same underprivileged children, without also boldly and honestly acknowledging that it was, indeed, the Kufuor-led New Patriotic Party (NPP), during the last eight years, that initiated the tuition-free program for Ghanaian elementary school children. Even more significantly, the fact that 20 years of P/NDC tyranny had witnessed the deliberately systematic dismantling of all social welfare programs – among them healthcare and education – was altogether ignored by the NDC General-Secretary. I was, however, mischievously elated that Mr. Sam made absolutely no mention of the NPP-instituted School-Feeding Program for, as may be vividly recalled, Vice-President John Dramani Mahama had eerily indicated, during the party’s electioneering campaign, that topmost among the NDC’s first order of business would be to critically examine the SFP and possibly eliminate it altogether. And so it is not clear precisely what the NDC General-Secretary is talking about vis-à-vis the government’s evidently overnight sensitivity to the education of underprivileged Ghanaian children.

On the perennial and seemingly intractable question of cost-cutting, the rather myopic and self-serving recent decision by President Atta-Mills not to tap into his constitutionally stipulated “per diem” allowance during foreign travels is not, to say the least, even of any symbolic significance, short of a lurid publicity stunt. To be certain, a more significant initiative would have been for the President to simultaneously call on his cabinet members, and other senior officials, to follow suit since, by and large, wherever key members of government travel abroad, with the existence of a Ghanaian embassy or consulate, or any such diplomatic establishment, the basic needs of such envoys are routinely taken care of.

Also, while it is obviously laudable for the President to reduce the size of his convoy, and/ or the size of his retinue on his travels abroad, such “savings” as might be perceived to accrue thereof are purely symbolic, particularly when the latter is coupled with such profligate, across-the-board expenditure as the orgiastic quadrennial auto-largesse granted our Members of Parliament (MPs), irrespective of real or practical need.

Furthermore, the decision by the Atta-Mills government to marginally reduce the number of cabinet appointees is, ultimately, far less significant than the caliber of those appointed. In the short space of the NDC’s six months in office, we have been forced to take several of the key cabinet appointees to task on the critical question of functional incompetence. Also, the purely politically-motivated scrapping of the Ministry for Fisheries, for instance, has turned out to have been a sheer stunt, as we aptly anticipated, even as coastal fishermen continue to bitterly and ruefully complain about the NDC having deviously misled them into voting against their better judgment and collective interest.

Ultimately, short of admirably and wisely preserving such progressive NPP policy initiatives as the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), the NDC has yet to present the Ghanaian citizenry with any creative initiatives or an agenda of its own.

It is also laughable for the NDC-USA General-Secretary to self-righteously claim, without any forensic proof, whatsoever, that it was, indeed, the Kufuor administration that unpatriotically induced the unsavory and patently regressive culture of drugs in the country. To be certain, as early as the mid-1980s, when the P/NDC was deeply entrenched in the seat of governance, the United States’ Department of State had Ghana fingered as a fast-rising major hub in the commercial transshipment of heroine and cocaine from Asia and elsewhere.

Relevantly, I have also read Mr. Konongo Fordjuor’s rejoinder to the Enquirer newspaper and find it to be rather too self-explanatory to comment on it in depth. Suffice it to observe, however, that the man whose E-mail posting sparked the current bout of incrimination and recrimination between Ghana’s two main political parties simply desires to be hired by Mr. Raymond Archer as a development-oriented columnist for both the Enquirer rag and the Atta-Mills government, in order to evidently make himself more publicly useful and relevant, having epically lost his recent bid to be elected NPP-USA Chairman. We can only (no tongue-in-cheek here) wish Mr. Fordjuor well in his new bid. We hope that his wish is granted. Naturally, the rest of us democracy-loving Ghanaians have no other alternative but to fervidly work to unseat President Atta-Mills and the incurably regressive regime of the so-called National Democratic Congress (NDC).

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is the author of 20 books, including “Ghanaian Politics Today” (Atumpan Publications/Lulu.com, 2008). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@aol.com. ###