NDC Leaders Are Jittery Because the GTP Will Expose Them before Ghanaian Voters

The Mahama and the Asiedu-Nketia Gang said that the Akufo-Addo-implemented Fee-Free Senior High School System (FF-SHSS) was a gross misplacement of priorities, because the Government did not have the funding to provide each and every talented and able-bodied Ghanaian youth who qualified to attend with this most fundamental and professionally indispensable opportunity to attend, even as they shipped and flew their own children, wards and relatives abroad to some of the most expensive and selective high schools, colleges and universities, to some of the same countries in the Western World that they pontifically claimed were solely responsible for the socioeconomic distress of Ghanaians and Continental Africans as a while.

Meanwhile, these same leaders of the John “European Airbus Payola” Dramani Mahama cabinet were drawing home double salaries on a monthly or biweekly basis with reckless abandon and the collaborative complicity of their clinically kleptocratic boss. Now, this is what a real misplacement of priorities looks like, if cynical Akufo-Addo critics like Mr. Mustapha Gbande, the Deputy General-Secretary of the country's main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), are genuinely interested in knowing the same (See “Govt’s Performance Tracker a Misplaced Priority – NDC” Modernghana.com 4/11/24).

The grim but very instructive fact of the matter is that even if a genuine priority policy initiative hit any of these nation-wrecking operatives of the National Democratic Congress smack up in their face, it is highly doubtful that any of these irredeemable national economy’s demolition squad, who effectively and totally bankrupted the John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor-implemented low-premium National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), would know just what hit them. Which also immediately reminds Sincerely Yours of what former President Agyekum-Kufuor used to constantly remind Ghanaians about the pathological cynicism of the then Mills-Mahama-led National Democratic Congress’ apparatchiks: “They know the price of everything and the value of absolutely none,” the former Deputy Foreign Minister in the erstwhile democratically elected government of the Prime Minister Kofi Abrefa Busiia-led Progress Party (PP) once told a packed plenary session of Ghana’s Third Parliament.

Indeed, about the only genuine concern here is the fact that it took so long for a government that had since long firmly established the politically progressive cabinet portfolio of a Minister of Monitoring and Evaluation of the performance of both cabinet and non-cabinet ministerial appointees, at the Presidency, to also establish an objective and a scientifically unimpeachable process by which to promptly and accurately capture the national development program of activities by government officials and other executive appointees and assigns in real time.

It is also rather laughable and ironic for Mr. Gbande to bitterly accuse President Akufo-Addo and Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia of misappropriating scarce fiscal resources that could have been put to more profitable use by investing the same in the very National Health Insurance Scheme, that is, the same social-intervention program that an extant President Mahama criminally and deliberately bankrupted, and then scandalously scapegoated Mr. Sylvester Mensah, the very Executive-Director of the National Health Insurance Authority (NHIA), whom Mr. Mahama had personally handpicked to manage the National Health Insurance Scheme, because Mr. Mensah had allegedly flatly refused to divert funding specially earmarked for the administration of the NHIS into the 2016 Mahama Presidential Campaign.

Yes, it is both laughable and ironic, or ironic and laughable, because in the four-and-a-half years that he was Chief Resident of Jubilee House, the man who staunchly championed the Social Darwinian policy of the Cash-and-Carry healthcare regime which, by the way, was absolutely no viable and people-oriented healthcare policy at all but, rather, a veritable “Deathcare Policy” doggedly and unconscionably pursued by the operatives of the National Democratic Congress, under whose “Survival-of-the-Fittest” policy agenda indigent and lumpen-poor Ghanaian citizens who could not pay for healthcare services out of their own pockets and purses, were literally left to suffer and die the painful deaths of the extremely hardworking but woefully underprivileged.

Even with its widely acknowledged fiscal and managerial challenges, it is indisputably clear that the National Health Insurance Scheme, as it is currently operated under a lame-duck President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, is still far better and more efficiently managed than it was or had been under the previous ragtag Mills-Mahama regime of the National Democratic Congress, from 2009 to 2017. We know the preceding for an unvarnished and an incontrovertible fact and truth, because in his “Eyewitness News” interview with program host Mr. Umaru Sanda Amadu, the following was what Mr. Mustapha Gbande had to say to both his host and his audience: “Today, we are back to cash-and-carry in terms of infrastructure. They want to present what they have captured on a performance tracker that does not reflect what is [actually] on the ground.”

The critic does not make any specific reference to the New Patriotic Party-implemented National Health Insurance Scheme. Instead, Mr. Gbande volleys such strategically irrelevant and gratuitous shots as the following: “How will the performance tracker impact the ordinary Ghanaian who has not eaten in the last 24 hours?” And: “How would the performance tracker impact the life of an old lady who is helpless and cannot get any government intervention?” The fact of the matter is that heading into the 2024 Presidential Election, it is the relative and the comparative national-development achievements of the country’s two major political parties that are apt to determine which of our two major contenders or Presidential Candidates gets to occupy the highest and the most powerful elective office of the land, and not which of our leading Presidential Candidates was able to build more “Witch Villages,” and thus more successfully and vigorously promote the primitive and inexcusably sexist and misogynistic ideology of the Witch-Shaming of adult Ghanaian women in the northern half of the country, for the most part.

At any rate, what makes the Government’s Performance Tracker worthy of the attention of each and every Ghanaian citizen, as well as worthy of each and every pesewa and/or cedi invested in the same, is the fact that this mechanism aims to make all registered and eligible and potential voters objectively aware of what is really at stake in their choice of the next President of our beloved Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana, and not be easily or facilely swayed by the cynical and the self-serving rhetoric of our career politicians from both major ideological divides.

But that the implementation of the Government’s Performance Tracker has clearly put a deathly fear into the leadership of the state-property cannibalizing – now, let’s talk about State-Capture Kleptocrats here – National Democratic Congress, is all the more reason for this long-overdue electoral game-changing device to be heartily celebrated. If the GPT, as the Government/Governance Performance Tracker is more popularly known, puts the requisite heat on the butts of the thievish bullies of the National Democratic Congress, so much the better. Finally, progressive-thinking Ghanaian citizens and voters may be getting a vintage taste of what true and genuine democracy means.

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
April 11, 2024
E-mail: [email protected]