She is now a Member of Parliament on the ticket of the main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), whatever foul means she used to get there with the brazen and impudent complicity of her father, the NDC’s founding-father, Chairman Jerry John Rawlings, and some party bullies like Chairman Kofi Portuphy and career General-Secretary Johnson Asiedu-Nketia. And so she deserves some hearing on certain pressing issues of national concern (See “Flooding Unbearable, Government Must Act – Zanetor Rawlings” Classfmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 6/17/17). The problem here, though, is that when it comes to the subject of the annual flash flooding of Ghana’s capital and, indeed, the rest of the nation at large, the 30-something-year-old trained physician has no more credibility than her own father, former President Rawlings, who comfortably presided over the seasonal destruction of properties and lives for 20 years.
Indeed, rather than cavalierly and self-righteously call on the Akufo-Addo-led Administration of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) to “take a very serious look at reengineering our drainage system in Accra,” Dr. Zanetor Agyeman-Rawlings would be better positioned morally and politically to present to Parliament and the Flagstaff House a comprehensive blueprint of the sort of “reengineered drainage system” that she is talking about. You see, the days when self-righteous “Rhetoric-Oriented” strongmen like her father could facilely talk their way out of real and practical problems are well behind us. This is the time for practical politicking, if she really wants to make a difference in the quality of life of not only her constituents but citizens of the country at large.
It was quite obvious that Dr. Zanetor Rawlings was referring to her own father, when she wistfully cautioned that the days when politicians merely paid lip-service to “the perennial flooding” of the Accra metropolis, and then cheaply pretended to “sympathize with flood victims” and then went back to bed and waited for the next flood to erupt, only to go through the same nauseating motions again, is “fast getting out of hand.” I perfectly agree with the Klottey-Korle parliamentary “freshwoman,” except that I am also of the firm belief and opinion that she ought to have squarely put the bulk of the blame on the abjectly poor leadership of her own party, instead of mischievously pretending as if every Ghanaian citizen and politician was equally to blame.
And, by the way, isn’t it a great pity and a crying shame that it had to take the John Agyekum-Kufuor-led government of the New Patriotic Party to build the Keta Levee, in order to significantly reduce the unbearably high incidence of flooding in the very hometown and home-region of Chairman Rawlings’ own mother? Indeed, I don’t even know that she is not scandalously trying to score cheap political points, when Dr. Zanetor Rawlings claims to seriously “feel for the people who lose their properties and have to start life over again.” Which, of course, is not to say that President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo would be as unconscionably lax or lackadaisical towards the seemingly intractable havoc unleashed against hundreds of thousands of law-abiding citizens year-in and year-out.
I am quite certain that when Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia confers with his counterpart in Beijing, within the next 24 hours, the problem of the perennial flooding of our cities, towns and villages would be brought up for bilateral discussions. Refreshingly, the formalization of Galamsey, or illegal mining, an industry in which quite a critical mass of Chinese immigrants and migrants have been deeply involved, will not be up for discussion.
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