POLITICAL CONSTIPATION

 I'm pretty sure most of you would agree with me that the bliss, joy and aura that heralds Christmas and the new year seems to be dwindling at an alarming rate. I remember the times we used to build Christmas tents with palm fronds, decorating them with lights, flowers and anything that comes into our youthful minds. We create bombs with bamboos, which had car-bite as the bullets, guns made from carved wood with rubber stacked on that miniature gun, using scraped matches ends as its bullet. We, through our ingenuity devised a lot of strategies, namely paraphernalia, toys, guns and other aesthetic designs to grace the occasion, but that is not what we see these day. That for me is what takes the "Glory" from what used to be a blissful Christmas.

No wonder most of us find solace in selling finished products than producing them. We sell so much that even the countries producing these products have a hard time meeting our gluttonous demands. In Ghana, there isn’t any house without a seller. Evidently, you would see at least one seller in each house, mostly selling “provisions” namely biscuits, toffees, milk, sardine, and of course the “panyin de panyin akpeteshie”, which is hot served on the counter.

I’m finding the proliferation of container kiosks more interesting. Everybody is trying to put up these structures to sell. Hitherto, we’ve had stalls, kiosks, stores etc built for the purpose of selling but the emergence of these container kiosks buttresses, my assertion of Ghana as a shop owning country.

I’m sure we all are privy to the fact that every corner has a kiosk or stall situated on its borders. This is quite advantageous because you do not have to travel very far to the market to access those products.

The bane however is how this phenomenon is gradually turning our dear nation into a “borla” a worthless rubbish dump for other countries.

Here is a country where we import basically everything. Toothpick, plantain, maize, rice, beans, groundnut and even cassava or maybe pretty soon kokontey. I simply can’t fathom our mentality or better put the authority of the presidency to institute strict jurisdiction, preventing the import of these produce and products into our country, which could have easily been produced here and even sold at a cheaper price.

That for me evinces how handicapped our governments are in dealing with the problems that confront us.

I thought the NDC had always talked about value for money when they were in opposition. Now they are in power and I think they are not any better.

Korlebu Teaching hospital has been in dire crises and needs urgent attention. The facilities there are archaic and deplorable and show nothing of a modern 21^st century hospital. Sometimes, visiting such a hospital even makes you sicker. A patient who goes in there with malaria will end up coming back home with more diseases at his back. The incessant dying of pregnant women, due to the malfunctioning nature of the lifts is no exception of the crises that we have at hand.

In the order of nature and biological precedence, when one eats, it surely must be passed out after digestion, the same scenario is the case in our political arena, when we pay taxes, the money which goes into the government coffers(the stomach) is supposed to be passed out in the form of developmental projects but that ironically is not the case, it stays there!!!!!!!!!

Instead of stuffing the hospital with the equipments and valuable necessities, the government decides to buy a jet, for what???????? How possible, or I mean since when did the buying of those ostentatious and luxurious jets become more important and relevant than human lives.

Do our politicians really care about the sick? Do they empathize with the dying pregnant women? Couldn’t we have improvised without this imprudent and profligate expenditure on Jets? And couldn’t we have used the money to improve our obviously collapsed health facilities?

The answers to these questions are obvious. Our politicians lack the basic capabilities of addressing the problems that confront us. This is a classical case of possessing “multiple tongues”. The NDC criticizes the NPP for building the “Jubilee house” which they thought was a waste of the tax payers’ money, was unnecessary ad a white elephant. They argue the money could have been used to improve our suffocating health and education sectors. Now they’ve come to power and they are doing the same things, if not worse.

They promised to reduce taxes, reduce the price of petrol drastically, provide jobs, single spine, free access to health-care (one time payment for the NHIL) etc. all these fallacies and fantasies of promises are yet to be impeccably fulfilled. Any attempts to fulfill these promises leave much to be desired, so much so that leaving the situation in its sullied state would have been better of.

No wonder there isn’t any spec of civility in our political discourse these days.  Everybody gets up to say any arrant balderdash without recourse to morality. Politicians have become so desperate and vulgar that, the least chance they get is seen as an opportunity to hurl invective expletives at each other. “Greedy bastards” twits, stupid fool, nincompoop etc with other unsavory euphemisms and innuendos are all we hear these days.

This makes our politics very stinky and stale, pungent and repulsive.

Sometimes, I think because our politicians have failed us, they leave aside issues, dabbling in political expediency and despicable insults.

Tuning to these ‘mushroom’ Akan based radio stations is a headache. The only thing you hear is NPP and NDC fighting each other.  These insults are sometimes very nauseating.

For me our politicians have failed us absolutely and they apparently have no clue to the solution of our problems. Our so called technocrats are just so “unpractical” they don’t even know how to formulate policies…….hahahahaha, intellectual illiterates.

I definitely do not want to say our politicians are gifted thieves and slanderers, burglars and ferocious criminals but it’s curious to note how they fight so aggressively to climb to the corridors of power.  Is it just because they want to solve our problem that it should be an “all die be die” affair? Obviously not!!!

There is something in there that they’re all fighting for and we all know what it is; the tax payers money.

What’s more annoying is the avalanche of arrogance exhibited by these people we elect to power.  Their attitude transmogrifies the moment we elect them. When they are begging, literally sleeping on the floor for the electorate, they do so with humility, diligence and dumbfounding reverence. The moment they are given the nod, they forget about all the spurious promises they made, resorting only to the satisfaction of their whims and caprices.

The fact that everything in Ghana is politicized doesn’t in the least puzzle me. Facts being that the two main political parties are always at each others throat talking and talking and talking with no clear foresight on what developmental agenda they have for Ghana.

Every political party has its own manifesto and policy that it expects to achieve. That’s an unfortunate precedence, since it’s evidently clear that most of the parties do not necessarily project the national interest in their manifesto, but spew a creed and litany of outrageous promises( in the interest of their own parties), which are so fallacious and illusive, that they are never able to fulfill. For me, I think a national policy agenda should be looked at more seriously and in essence a national manifesto. We are tired of the empty political talks, which do not even inure to the benefit of the masses.

Sometimes, I’m tempted to think that we’ve for so long being under the authority of some few old men, who do not even know what internet or email addresses are, in effect, people who do not know anything about information technology and the modern 21^st century order are the ones who impose their crude medieval Stone Age policies on us.

For us to treat (because we can never eradicate these problems) our protracted political constipation, it’s imperative on us as a people to start using our brains and eschew this political nonsense that we’ve engulfed our dear nation into.

Our political leaders should at least be taught that we do not appreciate the kind of ancient analysis they do when it comes to formulating our policies.

For me, I think the most ostensible and prudent means of self actualization at the state level is calling the bluff of the so called whites (which I think is erroneous because a human being can’t be white) in relation to our natural resources, from which we benefit nothing. Pragmatic policies and directives should be issued to wipe out the increasing menace of lawlessness and disregard to the rights of other people. Indeed unless our leaders relent in massaging wrong doing without fear or favor, we will still be in the mess in which we are and even worse.

Finally, I think the long boring speeches are enough; we’re tired of the lengthy monotonous talks. Today the president says I will do this I will do that- we’ve had enough of this, and we’re tired of the radio social commentators, who do nothing but teach us how best to insult. What we need now is action, action, uncle Attah, crack the whip!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Merry Christmas and a Prosperous New Year