Monday 17 November 2008

ARTHUR KENNEDY & CO.: STOP BEING ECONOMICAL WITH THE TRUTH – FOR, NOT ALL GHANAIANS ARE FOOLS!

I was astonished to hear some of the reasons Dr. Arthur Kennedy gave on Metro TV’s “Good Morning Ghana” breakfast show (telecast on Monday 17th November 2008), in seeking to justify the president’s unnecessary trips abroad.

How can that gentleman possibly say that the president had to travel to the country’s which forgave Ghana’s external debt, because (to paraphrase him) the people, who forgave us the debt, don’t live in Ghana? Does Dr. Arthur Kennedy seriously think that those nations that forgave us our debt did so because of President Kufuour’s endless and unnecessary travels abroad?

Perhaps Dr. Kennedy has come to believe in his own party’s never-ending dissimulation? Well, in case he does not realise it, his party, like most of our largely clueless political class, neither had the nous or the gumption, in the 1990’s, when some of us were fighting for debt relief (because we believed, correctly, that that was the only way that our economies could ever experience sustained growth), to join us in the fight to get our country (and others like it, across Africa!) a fresh start: and a fighting chance at achieving sustained economic growth.

The truth of the matter is that they are mere beneficiaries of other people’s steadfastness, foresight and creative thinking. Yet, today, the greed of the powerful few crooks who dominate his party, and who have benefitted enormously from the large debt they have succeeded in piling up again, has ended up taking us right back to square one.

We are now more or less suffering from the same “debt distress” that was squeezing the very lifeblood out of our country during the tenure of the previous regime and before our debts were cancelled - yet, this latter-day Goebbels seeks to put a spin on this outrage. Incredible!

He also talked (smoothly and glibly as he is wont to do!) about the public procurement law, now in place, as yet another achievement of his party. What effrontery!

Is he not the recipient of a contract awarded without public tendering from the ministry of health, as we speak - something that flies in the face of that very law: and a contract that no ethical politician in any nation whose public life is underpinned by an ethos of common decency, in his position (and in the course of an election campaign to boot, too!) would have accepted or sought?

Was it not simply a cynical way for his party to provide him with income at Ghana’s expense - because his party had to compensate him for staying on in Ghana to help in their election campaign (after his failed bid for his party’s presidential candidature), rather than returning to his work in the US?

And to cap all that nonsense on bamboo stilts, that insufferable and arrogant Steven Asamoah-Boateng, then called in to the programme, to tell us that Zoomlion was all over Ghana - cleaning the country. Does that uncouth buffoon not ever go out - and if he does, is he so blind that he is unable to see that our towns and cities are slowly being engulfed by filth? What perfidy!

Do they not understand that even the dimmest Ghanaians know that Zoomlion is their regime’s equivalent of the NDC regime’s leading and favourite, regime-crony oligarch’s "ordained-and-blessed" private-sector company, J. Stanley Owusu and Co.?

Does he not know that we all know that it was created when his party hit on the bright idea of creating their own contractors, to whom contracts could be awarded in exchange for kickbacks - as we were duly informed by no less a person than one of their party’s many ex-chairpersons, Mr. Haruna Esseku? Just what do some of our politicians take us for? Fools? God give us patience!

Hmmm, Ghana – enti yeawiye paa, enia? Asem ebaba debi ankasa! May God bless and protect our homeland Ghana, always. Long live freedom! Long live Ghana!

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