What do you expect from a politician like Ablakwa?

Mr. Samuel Okudzeto-Ablakwa is a freeloading government appointee who has never really held a real civil-service job. But he had admirably used his foothold in government to secure himself a juicy parliamentary seat, and with the latter a comfortable living and a fat check, just like National Democratic Congress apparatchiks like Messrs. Fiifi Kwetey and Richard Quarshigah, the notorious foulmouthed Keta schoolboy. And so it is only natural to expect that if a list is being composed to elevate some polytechnics into universities, that Mr. Ablakwa would deftly maneuver to have the Ho Polytechnic Institute, which is located in his home region of Volta, placed onto that list. Such self-serving maneuvering gives him some electioneering campaign bragging rights.

It also goes without saying that this year is an electoral watershed season. You simply can’t blame the young man for wanting to retain his Tongu parliamentary seat. Don’t ask me which of the two Tongu seats; I couldn’t care less. Anyway, a group calling itself the Coalition of Central Regional Youth has accused Mr. Ablakwa of deliberately shunting a more deserving Cape Coast Polytechnic Institute off the list, while ensuring that a supposedly far less deserving Ho Polytechnic Institute made the list (See “Ablakwa Denies Smuggling Ho Poly into [sic] Technical University List” Starrfmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 2/20/16).

I am not going to ask whether the Koforidua Polytechnic Institute, in my proverbial neck of the country, made the list or not because it really does not matter. What matters most is that students who have worked hard and qualify for admission to any of these newly-designated polytechnic universities would not be denied admission because they do not hail from any of the regions in which these polytechnic universities are located. It is an open secret that traditionally, residents of the Volta Region, stereotypically speaking, have been known to be relatively slow to readily welcoming students to schools and colleges in that region who were either not born in the Volta Region or are known to have no ethnic affiliation with the same.

In particular, my reference here is primarily to the Anlo-Ewe parts of the Volta Region. The situation is especially so when it has to do with the ethnicity of the head of an institution. Let’s not be politically correct about this open secret, which is that Anlo-Ewes are traditionally more hostile towards non-Ewe civil servants holding positions of considerable influence and trust in the region, compared to their fellow Akan citizens, for example.

I also really don’t know or care about Mr. Ablakwa’s lament that those accusing him of nepotism, in the decision regarding which polytechnic institute made the list of the first batch of newly converted polytechnic universities, were being “wicked and malicious.” What I know for a fact is that the Atta-Mills-proposed Allied Health University of the Volta Region was almost totally packed with Ewe-descended Ghanaians on its boards of advisers, trustees, administrators and promoters of the initiative. It was strikingly akin to the infamous GYEEDA Scam in which only northern-descended Ghanaians qualified to hold administrative and trusteeship positions. Talk of Ghana as a typical African constitutional democracy!

Now, I don’t know the basis upon which the Coalition of Central Regional Youth predicated their criticism that Mr. Ablakwa, the Deputy Education Minister for Tertiary Education, has, somehow, allowed both his ethnicity and region of provenance to color the decision of which polytechnic institute made the list of the newly designated polytechnic universities. The coalition members or their executives need to present a far better proof than merely invoking Mr. Ablakwa’s ethnicity or region of birth or descent, if they want to be taken seriously. For starters, the substantive Minister of Education, Prof. Jane Naana Opoku-Agyeman, who is also a former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cape Coast (UCC), is a bona fide Fante and a longtime resident of the Central Region.

If, indeed, the Cape Coast Polytechnic Institute better qualified to be named among the list of the first batch of newly designated or converted polytechnic universities in the country, you bet Naana Opoku-Agyeman would not have dumbly clammed up or kept mum while her own people were meted the proverbial short-end of the stick. Of course, there is a lot of ethnic prejudice in Ghana that is invariably brazenly muffed into the routine policy practices of the country’s two major political parties, namely, the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP). Sometimes I wonder whether the level and practice of ethnic chauvinism is not higher and relatively more shameless in Ghana than the practice of racism and ethnic chauvinism right here in the United States.

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