From time to time, I leave our dire issues of underdevelopment to dabble in other people’s affairs. But who will not mind an age ahead of you performing wonders that make you feel you are young as a septuagenarian to still pursue dreams. A nonagenarian, at 92, has just successfully managed political campaign rigour to emerge an election winner. What a feat!
Interestingly, it is another Malaysian feat. They performed the feat of leaving us behind in senseless coups, transforming the oil palm they borrowed and studied from us while our soldiers and politicians were borrowing other people’s money to uselessly build other people’s Dubai in Ga land.
You first think about Brother Mugabe whose age miracle is negatively assessed.
The name has become so associated with negativity that his longevity would perhaps match the scientist who thinks he should die because he has lived long enough.
He actually bought a plane ticket to travel from Australia, where they wouldn’t allow him to die, and travelled to Switzerland where he freely exercised his right to die.
At age 104 and not in the best of health by his own estimation, biologist and ecologist Dr David Goodall believed he had no business being alive when he was hardly living. So he has died his own chosen way.
Ghana is said to be among the places where he lectured and conducted research.
I wish my librarian friend would be able to retrieve some of his made-in-Ghana research results.
When I read Mahathir Mohamad’s, the medical officer who much chose politics over medical practice and did wonderfully well by moving his nation from third world to almost first world, I immediately thought of Nkrumah in 1965. I still maintain if Kwame Nkrumah had voluntarily left office to allow the 1965 election, his last, to have elected someone else, Ghanaian people would have gone kneeling before him to return to govern wherever he would have been.
The man he deposed, Najib Razak at 64 has been dogged by corruption allegations; just like our today’s thirty, forty and fifty somethings. In some kind of sin atonement, Mahathir managed an impossible alliance with his former deputy he imprisoned, Anwar Ibrahim, 71, who now the former says he would relinquish the prime ministership to in two years.
Many thought Anwar was politically finished as victim of Mahathir’s ruthless political persecution.
More recently, when my asomasi friend found himself suddenly the president of the motherland republic in July 2012, I wrote in this column that he should allow someone else to contest the president from his congress and rather concentrate on completing whatever projects and programmes they had begun.
Of course, being president is too sweet to let an opportunity pass. So what I was saying apparently made no sense. But if he had heeded my thinking, today he wouldn’t be desperately seeking to redeem himself of over two million votes heaviest defeat ever inflicted on a fifty something candidate by a seventy something competitor.
The man has proven an over ninety political savviness in strategizing can be as successful as a fifty something’s can be disappointing.
I don’t think anyone thought he would be able to team up with a man, his deputy he had persecutor to the extent of sending him to prison on a common platform.
He was able to achieve that confounding all the skeptics in the process.
To have struck a deal with his ally turned foe was no mean feat.
Where people in their forties and fifties used to lead nations, today, people begin in their twenties to chase money and wealth.
By latter stages of life, they are so corrupt they would not run for political office or they get caught stealing public money all over as corrupt individuals not fit for political office.
What I cannot tell will happen but hope should is for all these young people who think it is their time to run this country they lack the life and living understanding to lead, to wake up to the fact that if, indeed, it is selfless service you want to render to your motherland that can still happen at age 92 so there is no need to rush.
I don’t think the over ninety man is looking for a mansion or V8 or any vanity of a life like that.
The conclusion then is that it seems only the greedy amp?br? would most likely rush into the motherland’s politics so they can create looting schemes to share and chop public money.
It seems the quickest way to make money even when it is clear it is at the expense of the motherland’s development rather than helping lift her from her low state of development to a higher one.
By Kwasi Ansu-Kyeremeh