President Nana Akufo-Addo
It is easy to start off with high moral standards, strong convictions, and determination to beat down corruption. But it is difficult to live up to these good intentions unless the leaders are strong and determined enough to deal with all transgressors, and without exceptions. We cannot afford to forget that public order, personal security, economic and social progress, and prosperity are not the natural order of things, that they depend on ceaseless effort and attention from an honest and effective government that the people must elect”.
–Lee Kuan Yew
“’Who told you that you are naked?’ ‘Have you eaten fruit from the tree I warned you about?’ ‘Yes’ Adam admitted, ‘but it was the woman you gave me who brought me some, and I ate it’. Then the Lord God asked the woman, ‘How could you do such a thing?’ ‘The serpent tricked me’, she replied’”
–The Living Bible
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, has this to say about the Trojan Horse: “The Trojan Horse is a tale from the Trojan War about the subterfuge that the Greeks used to enter the city of Troy and win the war. In the canonical version, after a fruitless 10-year siege, the Greeks constructed a huge wooden horse, and hid a select force of men inside. The Greeks pretended to sail away, and the Trojans pulled the horse into their city as a victory trophy. That night the Greek force crept out of the horse and opened the gates for the rest of the Greek army, which had sailed back under cover of night. The Greeks entered and destroyed the city of Troy, ending the war. Metaphorically a “Trojan Horse” has come to mean any trick or stratagem that causes a target to invite a foe into a securely protected bastion or place”.
As a leader, if the criminals do not get to you directly, they will get to you through your spouse or your children or the members of your close or distance family or your church leader or your traditional leader or your political appointees or your friends or even your enemies. One basic trick the IMF plays on poor third world countries which have been destroyed through the greed, mismanagement and corruption of their gullible leaders is the offer of supposedly free dinner. The IMF will come to you and take you to a posh restaurant and ask you to eat anything of your choice, free of charge, assuring you that your grandchildren will come and pay (so called conditionalities). After you have eaten enough and your stomach is full, the IMF will give you quick acting purgative for you to purge your bowels so that you can sit down and eat some more. When eventually you are fully satisfied, the IMF will lead you to the entrance of the restaurant and at that point, the IMF will give you a bill to pay. The IMF will tell you the bill is for the dinner your grandfather took. That is a typical Trojan Horse subterfuge. As the very famous saying goes: “there is no free dinner”.
When Nana Akufo Addo, the president, inaugurated the Ghana @60 Committee, he promised the nation that virtually all the funds for the celebration would be coming from the private sector. When I heard him say that I told myself, “hei, wait a minute, did I hear right”. The private sector is not a Salvation Army involved in free humanitarian religious activities. The private sector is there to make maximum profit for its beneficial owners. So if a private businessman is going to contribute to a national assignment after he has paid all his legitimate taxes, then you can expect that the businessman will be placing a Trojan Horse at your doorstep at the least opportunity. That was why my heart missed a beat from shock when I read that a private sector financial institution was going to donate US$100nillion towards the NPP policy of one village one factory project. Then the shock I had turned into electrocution when I read it in the newspapers and also saw and heard President Akufo Addo waxing eloquence about the receipt of the best birthday gift of US$100 million as sponsorship for one of the pet projects of his NPP administration, the one village one factory project.
As I sat down pondering over the issue, my mind went back to what I had heard sometime back about a famous religious personality who was reported to have said one time that she was not worried about the source of donation to her charity organisation so long as it is put to a good use. If somebody can give you “free” US$100 million, then it means he must have over one billion United States dollars waiting on call somewhere. But that is not what worries me. That financial institution must have hatched a well-oiled strategic plan to get that money and multiples of it back as soon as possible. But that still is a small worry to me. The NPP was voted into power on the gospel of “change”. The NPP was voted into power to use an effective and efficient broom to sweep away the criminals who constituted the evil satanic NDC looting empire and to dispatch then to the hottest part of hell.
During the entire reign of the PNDC/NDC, the greedy bastards, the old evil dwarfs, the babies with sharp teeth, the liars, the leeches by whatever name the Godfather of the despicable organisation chose to call them, the constituent apparatchiks constituted themselves into a rainbow coalition of a Frankenstein monster, a Dracula blood sucking vampire bat that fed on the nation. The PNDC created a specialist thieving organisation called Divestiture Implementation Committee (DIC) which provided a looting machinery to “sell” cheaply all the state industries which constituted the jewels in the king’s crown to members of the PNDC and their imbecile criminal local and foreign collaborators. When that was done, the NDC set up another stealing mechanism, soul sourcing, to reap off the nation through the awards of contracts to its members and cronies and family members and accomplices.
E-mail: macgyasi@gmail.com
By Kwame Gyasi