Sammy Gyamfi
We are back after a three-week lockdown. Our loyal readers who in the course of the necessary lockdown did not stop their calls of enquiry as to when we were resuming deserve our gratitude for their loyalty and words of encouragement as we observed the furlough. We are grateful to them as well as our advertisers whose patronage remains steadfast.
To our vendors, without whose support the final product would not reach our readers, we doff our hats as we demand of them more of such services.
In the course of the break, when frontline health workers and the security services were putting their lives on the line for Ghana, the opposition NDC was busy doing their usual diabolical manoeuvres spiced with subtle political chicanery.
In our view, the NDC is an opposition grouping which is as much a challenge for Ghana as is COVID-19 which prompted the lockdown.
The latter is however, a better option because of its transience and somewhat predictability. Not so, however, the former which as a political party obsessed with obtaining political power by all means regardless of ethical considerations are ready to do anything including praying and fasting pretentiously even as they plan evil.
While in some countries the peak for the coronavirus has been reached in tune with the modeling of experts and therefore, set to head for the chapters of history books, the NDC on the other hand continues to post unusual and hypocritical behavior and counting.
For them exploiting a health crisis such as COVID-19 is fair game and should therefore not be spared in their dirty schemes. That is the NDC; their cornerstone being hypocrisy and shamelessness. Bowing their heads in a pretentious act of supplication to God and fasting came in handy recently when the whole country turned to the Creator in the face of the ravaging pestilence, theirs taking place on a different day.
When a political party is embroiled in consistent vacillation it becomes easy to see them as a desperate grouping which for want of a subject to stir up controversy would grip at anything which came their way.
That is the reality of the opposition NDC which never cease to make the headlines for the wrong reasons.
For sure, the leadership of the party did not mince words about its determination to politicize COVID-19. What it did not do was to add ‘for electoral leverage’ to their notice. Of course every Ghanaian understands the party’s obsession with electoral matters and therefore, exploiting this by all means, regardless of the inherent illogicalities, to see whether or not that could be a game-changer for them.
The party’s scribe who told Ghanaians that the idea of a lockdown was to facilitate the rigging of the forthcoming polls has changed grounds once more and that would not be the end anyway.
All Ghanaians are witnesses to the painstaking deliberation which took place behind closed doors at Jubilee House before the decision was finally taken to lock down the country. As the hands of the clock moved, Ghanaians held their breath wondering whether or not the lockdown would come until the final partial restriction was announced by the President himself.
It was not just a shutdown of the country but a time to undertake scientific collection of data and more importantly, the contract-tracing of persons who had contracted the disease.
Indeed the management of the subject earned the President a world-acclaim. Enter the successful sequencing of the virus by local scientists—a feat which added to the enviable stature of the country in the international comity of scientists.
Policymakers would be undeserving of deference were they to ignore the contents of the findings of their outstanding scientists. They embraced the findings and of course employed them in their final decision to open up the country. If that does not stand good governance apart from its contrary then we do not know what else does.
Academics and others in the NDC cannot pretend not to know that scientific factors that informed the decision to reverse the lockdown fiat.
When dealing with a political grouping whose leadership prefers electoral matters to development and therefore, the welfare of the masses, such fallouts should not be surprising.
Today the lockdown which they accused the President and his government of tarrying about has been implemented and now reversed and they have changed their position once more. President Akufo-Addo’s decision on the reversal is informed by plans to ensure that a registration exercise towards the compilation of a new voters’ register is undertaken—they are now claiming.