Politics is an olympics sport of hypocrisy and John Mahama is about to break the hypocrisy record with his tribalistic effusions and policies.President Mahama and his NDC honchos have become so obsessed with Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo’s vision of ensuring that every child in this country gets a chance of free secondary education such that wherever they are, they rubbish it and create the impression that it is not achievable. How many times have we heard from these NDC pessimists that something cannot be done by NPP and have been made to eat crow? NDC want Ghanaians to believe that free secondary school will be inferior if made free

.Is Mahama who is protecting the Northern interest telling us that the education he and his 18 siblings received as Northerners was inferior? If the free education in the North is inferior, then I want same for my family because that inferior education provided to Mahama and Mahama Ayariga at Ghana secondary school at Tamale and a free one to Dr. Abu Sakara at Yendi secondary school has given us three articulate well educated Presidential candidates so maybe inferior secondary school is not that bad after all.You can't cast a play in Hell and expect Angels as Actors,if the free education in the North was inferior it would not have given us three people out of the four Presidential candidates participating in the IEA debate, a word to the wise they say is enough or is it in the North?

President Mahama during the debate at Tamale said that he is trying to address the health worker shortage in the North and that is why the 200 or 250 students sent to Cuba for training were selected from deprived areas, euphemism for the three Northern regions since every one of these students came from the three Northern Regions. We were made to believe that these students were going to Cuba under a scholarship granted to them by the Cuba government not knowing that these students were selected by the Vice President at the time, John Dramani Mahama himself and all of them were Northerners who were going to be educated at a cost of $5,000 a year for four years each of the two hundred students and that works to a total amount of four million dollars which my taxes and that of the cocoa farmers, will pay for but their wards were excluded from benefitting because they are not from the North.If the President really believes in the Constitution, then he has to be told that his decision to select 200 Ghanaians from the same geographical area for training in Cuba is a blatant discrimination against the majority of us in the southern part of Ghana; an act which offends the Constitution.

His reasons for choosing people for training only from the northern sector of the country are bunkum and baloney, to use his own words.Is President Mahama telling us NDC has developed a policy that is aimed at addressing the shortage of health workers in the North by training Northerners who will gladly accept postings to the North because they are indigenes of the area? Will it be right to send only Asantes abroad to be trained as Accountants because we don't have enough Asantes as Accountants? What about sending Fantes or Gas abroad to be trained as Lawyers because we don't have enough Fantes and Gas as Lawyers? Are the rest of Ghanaians going to have a problem with that?

This is a simplistic reasoning and it is like treating a wound with plasters with a health condition that requires amputation. By this reasoning, Mahama believes there are not enough Northerners trained to mann hospitals and clinics in the North but that is not the case. We have enough Northern Doctors and Nurses in the system but they even refuse to accept postings to the Northern regions because of lack of social amenities and there is no guarantee those Northerners sent to Cuba for training will accept postings to the North. Were they made to sign a contract to do so after training? Doing the wrong thing to address a problem is not a solution, it just creates another problem. Award such future scholarship to all Ghanaians and nade them sign a bond that they will serve in deprived areas.

Anyway, when did it become the law or the policy in Ghana that we have to send only Northerners to the North to work there? Mahama should know that, Ewes, Asantes, Bonos, Gas, Fantes and other tribes will gladly accept postings to the North if they decentralize and spread the development projects of the country so that Tamale, Bolgatanga and Wa will look like real cities instead of the dusty big villages they are because Northerners are very accomodating and nice people who accept others into their sphere, but nobody wants to live in a place that lacks modern amenities and until the government realise this shortcomings in the system, people will continue to refuse postings to the North.

President Mahama, can you tell Ghanaians why "out of the 100 Ghanaians studying in Aberdeen in the United Kingdom, 90 of them come from your area? It is incumbent on you to tell Ghanaians that the GNPC has an educational fund of $3million for manpower training in the oil sector. How many people from the Western Region are studying at Aberdeen out of the 100? You have, ever since you became the Vice President and subsequently the President of this country, discriminated against those of us from the south." Sometimes when you want to fight against discrimination of any form, you have to bring to the notice of the populace things that are not palatable to read and might wrongly expose you the messenger bearing the message as a tribalist but the truth should be told, what President Mahama is doing would not have been accepted by the Northerners if they were systematically discriminated against like this. Will the rest of the country accept if an Asante President of Ghana decides there are not enough Asante Pysicians in Ghana and will therefore award two hundred scholarships with people with names like Opoku, Boateng, Sarpong and other Akan names and those with names like Mumuni, Atia Frafra, Ayariga needs not apply? When it is not you who is bleeding from fresh wounds, it is very easy for you to suggest pepper to be applied to the wounds for healing.ENOUGH SAID

We have had a President before who turned scholarship secretariat into Ewe secretariat where more than 90% of scholarships awarded to people to study in Canada and UK went to Ewes from 1983 to 2000 and it seems that discrimination is creeping back under Mahama's administration. Ghana cannot continue on this path where people are discriminated against based on tribes.

Mr Mahama, 'you are opposed to free SHS for those of us from the south while it is still being implemented in the north, you decided to pick only people from the northern part of the country for the Cuban programme with such distorted reasoning which is vomitory and discourteous to the rest of us in this country and spend the GNPC educational fund also in blatant discrimination in favour of people from the northern part of this country. This is too bad and very much divisive for this country.' Ghana cannot be divided on tribal lines with tribal policies. After fifty years of free education to the North, we don't need any new policies to favor the Northerners.

We have Northern Professionals in all Professional fields in the country and if people don't want to go and work in the North, it is not because we don't have educated Northerners to fill the void, it is because Ghana has failed to spread developmental projects to all corners of the country and has made Accra/Tema and Kumasi the only places in Ghana worth living as Dr Sakara said during the Presidential debate. Of the 5000 Doctors in Ghana, 2000 are employed in Accra and 2000 in Kumasi whilst the rest of the country has to do with the 1000 Doctors left and that means 20% of the population in Ghana has the services of 80% of the Doctors in the syatem whilst 80% of the people are left with 20% of the Doctors. Something drastic needs to be done to address some of these anomalies in society so that Ghana's nascent democracy will not be a stillborn.

Justice Sarpong

Houston, Texas

(CARDINAL of TRUTH)