At a meeting with members of the global diplomatic corps resident in the Ghanaian capital of Accra, Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia was widely reported to have said that the key operatives of the Akufo-Addo-led New Patriotic Party (NPP) Administration had not been communicating effectively with most of the Ghanaian electorate on the remarkable achievements of the present government.
What we clearly have here is not necessarily a simple failure on the part of the present government to effectively communicate its yeomanly achievements to the people who gave them their electoral mandate. Rather, what is at stake here is what the key operatives of the Akufo-Addo Administration have chosen to communicate vis-à-vis their party’s ginormous achievements in the nearly two years at the helm of our nation’s affairs by Messrs. Akufo-Addo and Bawumia. You see, anybody who has been studiously watching the local political scene would quickly realize that for quite sometime now, the leaders of the Rawlings-founded National Democratic Congress (NDC) have been able to suavely, albeit scandalously, convince the average Ghanaian citizen, by and large, that instant gratification is the name of the game, as it were.
The preceding propaganda scheme or tactic is what the Supreme Court’s Justice Jones Dotse poignantly characterized as the morbidly kleptocratic mentality of the leaders of the National Democratic Congress, that recklessly counseled the false creation, looting and sharing of our collective national resources among the “yes-men” and women of the party and their cronies and associates. While, indeed, it is an undeniable fact that, by and large, the communications department and apparatus of the ruling New Patriotic Party has been relatively dormant, compared to the intolerably stentorian propaganda machinery of the faux-communist oriented National Democratic Congress, the fact of the matter is that the key operatives of the New Patriotic Party, including yes, Vice-President Bawumia – and, refreshingly, the latter admits of the same – have been picking on the wrong achievements of the Akufo-Addo Administration to harp upon.
For instance, during his widely reported meeting with the members of the locally resident global diplomatic corps, Dr. Bawumia rather naively chose to highlight his government’s achievements in the basic education sector. And on the latter count, of course, we are referring to the historic implementation of the long-awaited fee-free Senior High School System. You see, while such a progressive program or policy initiative would play well with an audience of international diplomats and intellectuals and scholars, nevertheless, this is clearly a long-term policy initiative. In other words, what Messrs. Akufo-Addo and Bawumia ought to be emphasizing is the New Patriotic Party’s remarkable achievements in the agriculture sector, in the main, the resonant – or ringing – success of the so-called Planting for Food and Jobs policy initiative, which I prefer to re-designate as “Feed Ghana!”
Needless to say, the Planting for Food and Jobs Program is the most successful of its kind to be implemented in the country since the bonanza era of the woefully short-lived Operation Feed Yourself (OFY) Program that was implemented in the early 1970s by the Ignatius Kutu Acheampong-led junta of the National Redemption Council (NRC), later renamed as the Supreme Military Council (SMC-I), to be exact. You see, when the national conversation latches onto what kind of Christmas or Yuletide Ghanaians will be celebrating, and you, predictably, have even shameless political cynics and unconscionable reprobates like former President John Dramani Mahama, a man who has made himself infamous for routinely spending his Christmas vacations in the predominantly Muslim UAE capital of Dubai, then, of course, it becomes unmistakably clear that the focus of our ever-scheming opposition politicians, in particular, is one of instant gratification.
Well, I use the parenthetical term of “in particular” here because we also have opportunistic scumbags and perennial political fixtures of the ruling New Patriotic Party like the pathologically self-interested Mr. Kennedy Ohene Agyapong brazenly in synch with the cynical symphony of the National Democratic Congress’ parliamentary minority’s hypocritical chorus on a “Dry Christmas,” conveniently and scandalously forgetting that throughout the four-and-half years that Mr. John Dramani Mahama ruled the country, Ghanaians not only “celebrated” – for want of a better term – a serially or consecutively “Dry Christmas,” but even worse, we celebrated our incomparably mournful Christmases in the Stygian Darkness of “Dumsor” or the woeful and inexcusably erratic supply of electricity.
In other words, Vice-President Bawumia and his associates ought to be emphasizing what the present Akufo-Addo Administration has done far better than the democratically deposed Mahama regime, vis-à-vis the breakfast and dinner tables of the proverbial average Ghanaian, and stop making naïve and scandalous futuristic calculations about the practically invisible or routinely taken-for-granted savings that the parents and guardians of high school-attending Ghanaian youths have been able to save, ever since the admittedly auspicious implementation of the fee-free SHS policy initiative took effect.
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