“We cannot build an economy where corruption is the working capital”
— Muhammadu Buhari, President of Nigeria
“Democracies can no longer tolerate bribery, fraud and dishonesty; especially as such practices disproportionately hurt the poor”.
— Jimmy Carter, former President of the USA
So the criminal gang made up of greedy bastards, old evil dwarfs, babies with sharp teeth, thieves, stealers, leeches, liars, propagandists, team B players; the people who created well-oiled corruption machineries to loot and share the nation’s wealth to the discomfort of the entire nation and to their own advantage have been booted out of political office? Majority of the people in this country could not believe that it would happen. Not that the people of this country had any faith that the NDC, formed by capitalists of socialist pretences out of the rampaging mob of the PNDC could genuinely win any free and fair elections. But the NDC held all the aces close to its chest in the December 7, 2016. Looking at its history, the NDC had been formed out of the PNDC using stolen national resources, the first political party in this country to be so formed. For a political party which could not pay its rent while in opposition, and within two years of gaining power, it was able to put up an ultra-modern national headquarters reputedly worth 20 million United States dollars in a prime area in Accra tells a story of fraud, corruption and evil mechanisation.
As if that was not enough, the NDC has always used stolen national resources to finance its political campaigns. It uses stolen national resources not only to purchase pickups which are distributed liberally among all its parliamentary candidates to aid them in their electioneering campaigning backed by sizable unaccountable monetary imprest to boot. The party erects clearly out of sight offensive billboards at vantage points and also buys items ranging from mundane household items like chamber pots and head pans to expensive four wheel vehicles and estate houses all from state resources for distribution to the electorates all in the quest to influence their voting. During the 2012 elections alone, the corrupt, incompetent, ethnocentric, nepotistic, greedy John Dramani Mahama NDC administration squandered over nine billon cedis of the nation’s resources to finance its electioneering campaign. The nation is still counting the cost of the money stolen this time around during this year’s elections. No doubt the amount will far exceed the figures for 2012 judging from the obscene manner in which frivolous but expensive freebies were tossed around in a distribution campaign led by the lady of the house.
There were other extenuating factors which made most Ghanaians develop goose pimples and had fright that the NDC was going to win the elections, albeit, through illegal and dubious means and that only spiritual and heavenly intervention and eternal vigilance on the part of the citizens could prevent that from happening. In the first place, the Electoral Commission, which is meant to be an independent objective referee, in actual fact, by all its acts of commission and omission leading to the elections and during the elections, portrayed itself as an organisation with a leadership populated by a batch of golliwogs and stringed puppets dancing to the tune of the NDC in a manner as if possessed by the devil. The Electoral Commissioners turned deaf ears to all meaningful suggestions coming from outside the NDC camp. As if the divisive stand of the Electoral Commission was not enough, the state security services which were expected to provide security to all manner of persons rather behaved as if the leadership formed part of the apron strings of the NDC providing selective injustice, protecting NDC crime perpetrators and picking up non-NDC supporters for no just causes. Thus, when the leadership of the security services visited Nana Akufo Addo, after he had won the presidential election, I thought they went there with copies of their resignation letters. I was surely disappointed by the hypocritical and the U-turn attitude and a dog in a manger behavior.
Again, the Peace Council which was supposed to calm waters and provide a soothing balm for flayed nerves of the worried citizens rather chose to behave like the proverbial ostrich. It completely either turned blind eyes to the atrocities which were committed by the rampaging apparatchiks of the NDC or issued meaningless innocuous statements whenever evil was perpetrated by NDC members and sympathisers and only woke up when persons belonging to the non-NDC party appeared to be at fault. Is it not interesting and very intuitive that it was only on the day when the Chairperson of the Electoral Commission faced the TV cameras to announce the result of the presidential elections that Ghanaians first got to know the faceless operators behind the Electoral Commission. I heard somebody exclaim in amazement that he did not know that five of the seven Commissioners were women with all the seven with unknown fixed addresses. How could the nation leave the most sensitive institution of the state in the hands of persons who do not appear to have known addresses?
Again how come only a retired Head of the Methodist Church is the only visible face of the Peace Council when we still harbor the idea of the gallant refusal of the former Moderator of the Presbyterian Church to accept bribes of V8 vehicle, a house at Trassacco Valley and US$100,000 to join the evil and satanic camp of the NDC? Today if the NDC is licking its wounds, it is not because the party lost the elections but because the leadership is still at sea as to how after all the massive rigging machinery the party put in place, the system could not guarantee the party election victory. A fool once said in his heart there is no God. So is it a fact that the rainbow coalition of the greedy bastards, the old evil dwarfs, the babies with sharp teeth, the liars, the propagandist, the thieves, the stealers, the people who created well-oiled corruption machineries to loot and share the nation’s wealth have been booted out of political office? Yes it is true, no matter how unbelievable it might sound. That was the battle. The war to be fought is to install zero tolerance for impunity and corruption in our body politics and society, something which we lost during the 27 years of atrocious poetical adventure under the PNDC?NDC evil political conglomerate.
E – mail: makgyasi@ug.edu.gh
BY Kwame Gyasi