John Evans Atta Mills National Democratic Congress (NDC) has been at the helm of government in Ghana for almost one year and it appears that every Ghanaian from Axim to Zuarungu is taking stock of what it has been able to accomplish to move Ghana and Ghanaians forward in the right direction.
The Mills administration was propelled into government on a ticket of change, change for the better for Ghanaians, socio-economic transformation and better livelihood for all Ghanaians. Indeed every Ghanaian was in January of this year most expectant when the President affirmed on a strong note that he and his government would hit the ground running. It is against all this background that
I wish to invite you to join me in this stock-taking exercise to reach conclusions on what Mills has been able to accomplish has not been able to accomplish.
This will enable us to position ourselves to grant President Mills either an order of the Volta and the Black Star on the positive side, or to hand down to him the ancient order of the dead vulture for ignominious failure and hang it around his neck.
What has Mills been able to accomplish since he was ushered into the presidency? The approach to answering this question is so confusing as one can imagine for an assignment that should otherwise be a straight-forward matter. This is because eight months into the Atta Mills Presidency, we began receiving mixed signals from various arms of the same government.
Whereas a good number of his ministers went about asking for more time and more patience, those from the same government�s Public Relations office were giving Ghanaians the strong word that the first eight months had been most successful without the exemplification of actual, done projects and deeds. The confusion was compounded and robbed of objectivity when the President himself marked his own homework and gave himself the high marks of 80%.
Which side were we to believe? The answer came from the President himself when he joined his so-called Team B at the information ministry to say that the mess that he inherited was so much and needs more time to prove himself. This from a man who came on the popular ticket of Mr Fixitall.
Trying to assess and evaluate what the Mills Presidency has been able to do therefore becomes as complex and confusing as learning to use a slide rule. Remember the slide rule that we were using before calculators reached Africa? We always came up with different answers to the same calculus. Yet, assess the NDC we must, because 2010 is coming soon, like the inevitable second coming of Jesus the Christ so let us start from the logical starting point of campaign promises. Atta Mills made a lot of promises and pledges. Number one was: WE SHALL REDUCE THE PRICES OF FUEL DRASTICALLY. As a teacher of English, I know that drastic has a strong meaning. This huge promise won the
NDC a lot of votes.
The GPRTU as a colossal constituency of commercial transporters immediately jumped on the Mills campaign bandwagon and sang their songs in expectation of fuel price reductions and voted for the NDC. What appended next is known to you. Instead of the drastic reduction [drastic means HUGE in this context] we rather received a DRASTIC 30% INCREASE to which 5% has just been added! The result has become the new national anthem: EWIASE AYE DEN! LIFE HAS BECOME DRASTICALLY HARD in Ghana. Just last week the students of the University of Ghana in Accra were stopped only at the last minute by the Legon Police before they marched into Accra central with placards on the same subject. As if that was not enough, Mills sat down in the Castle until all our petrol and gas oil pumps had dried up before he and his henchmen realized that there was a serious national shortage.
I think the current fuel crisis in Ghana is the most severe evidence of government incompetence. When some of us sat to discuss the economics of fuel shortages, we started with the coincidence that the very last time Ghanaians queued up for days for fuel was in 1997-99,
another period of NDC rule. Economics is a social science that discusses demand for goods and services, supply of the same, and prices determination among other things. Some things like salt, water, food and fuel are characterized by INELSATIC DEMAND. Whenever you put them on the market, they will be bought because they have no Alternatives and are and are indispensable basic necessities. Whatever their price levels, people have no choice but to buy them. So why sit down and let supplies run out to make life difficult for the people? I would defend the Mills government here that it was not deliberately planned that hydrocarbon fuels for the economy should be allowed to run out to make Ghanaians suffer. No.
If that is the case, then the reason behind the fuel shortages that we are experiencing is misrule, incompetence and ineptitude of the NDC government. Someone should consult former President Kufuor to find out how he managed to keep petroleum pumps flowing for eight continuous years. I think he will give a one word answer, STRATEGY, which the Mills administration seems to lack. Back to the Mills campaign promises.
The President promised to bring inflation down to ease the economic burden of Ghanaians. This was a most important promise because it bears a direct correlation to our quality of life and standards of living. Without belabouring the issue of whether Mills honoured his promise or not, I would only state that we are all living witnesses of whether or not the NDC did or did not deliver on this promise. Rather than using macro and micro-economic interventions to keep cedi tagging in twin-fashion to the dollar, the dollar was allowed to run away leaving our cedi behind and poorer. What one cedi could buy in January of this year, it can now buy just 55% of it.
Besides the fuel price increases as a contributory factor, how did this happen? The pledge and its necessary actions were forgotten because even Ministers left their offices and went about chasing Chryslers, Jaguars and Audis before they could sit to consider the problems and priorities of Ghana's economy. Ask Fiifi Kwetey if I am lying.
Now the cedi is lying on the operating table, panting for life without any good doctor o nurse in evidence. I do not envy Dr Kwabena Duffuor at all. Another mouth-watering campaign promise of Professor Mills related to a matter that immediately got the youth of Ghana ecstatically joining the NDC election bandwagon.
The youth are our future, and President Mills caught their votes by borrowing a word from Dr Paa Kwesi Ndoum of the CPP, JOBS, JOBS and JOBS. Who would not like to be respectably employed? Nobody likes
to be unemployed and idle. I wish to digress a little and state here that recently in South Africa, someone quietly observed to me that our former President Kufuor is still a very busy man internationally and asked me what former President Rawlings is doing. I responded that I honestly did not know.
Which surprised my questioner. Then he leered at me by insisting 11 might be idle and bored and may the devil not find a job for his hands. Whether or not 11 is idle and bored is not my beans here. My beef is that Mills promised jobs, won the election on that ticket and than almost immediately did an about-turn and dramatically stated that FOR THE NEXT TWO YEARS, THERE WILL BE NO PUBLIC SECTOR EMPLOYMENT. This announcement took Ghanaians aback, and as a parent with children in tertiary institutions, I thought it was a most careless and demoralizing piece of information for the government to give out. It demoralized the youth, our resource
for the future.
It actually meant to our youth: YOU ARE LEARNING BOOKS FOR NOTHING. And it shows because graduate unemployment has become a huge challenge to Ghana, while we keep on producing and counting unemployed graduates. A most harrowing action of Mills and his government was the sacking of National Youth Employees in their
tens of thousands and replacing them with the same number from his political camp.
This is a real case of robbing Peter to pay Paul, Period. Indeed, one easy way of knowing what Mills has done or not done is to consider one Ministry to the next and make a conscious objective effort at not giving a dog a bad name just for the pleasure of hanging it. So let us start from somewhere like agriculture our food and export basket. What Mills did not promise to farmers, he has done it by increasing the price of cocoa, and I think the farmers are quite happy.
But why do we still receive reports that cocoa farmers in the Volta and Western regions are carting cocoa beans across the borders into Togo and Ivory Coast when just six years ago the opposite was the case? Ahwoi has also done well by placing special subsidies on agricultural inputs such as seedlings and fertilizer.
But how come that there is a public outcry that tractors brought in by the previous administration have been mis-distributed with accusing fingers pointing to the Presidential Spokesperson Ayariga? He is accused of having acquired wrongly more tractors than he would need, especially when the young man is not a farmer and has never wielded a hoe? We count fishermen under agriculture.
Fishing communities who voted for Mills from across four coastal regions are now wringing their hands in consternation. August is the period for bumper fish harvests when fishermen make their money for the rest of the year. To be continued
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