My problem is that having been a teacher all these years, I am always tempted to remind people who speak what I think they should not be speaking; I itch to draw attention to that. For a septuagenarian doing everything to hide from ruthless dispatcher COVID-19, I have been trying my best not to hear evil, see it, speak it and above all write it.
However, it is all because someone spoke “probity and accountability” or accountability and probity. Biribi akɔka papa (something has touched the palm frond) and so papa agye trɛdɛ (the shove has elicited some sound from the frond).
I want to ask whoever, whether he’s ever heard of Lal Bahadur Shastri, the Indian Prime Minister who died penniless even though he gave his motherland a green revolution that fed the hungry. He should also find out more about Uruguayan President Jose Mujica who could only afford an old Volkswagen Beetle car. When an Arab sheikh pitied him and offered USD1 million for the car, Mujica said he would give the money to the homeless.
Somewhere in Africa, I would want people to tell me how many houses Mwalimu Julius Nyerere had. And right home here, let those speaking ‘p’ and ‘a’, visit Nkroful and come back with what they found and saw as Kwame Nkrumah’s house(s). I was shown a house he built for his mother; not in the best condition.
I saw a decrepit presidential (not personal) retreat centre. It served a purpose similar to a chalet perched on a hill across the Akosombo Dam. I understand Nkrumah always stayed with the mother when he visited and not in those buildings. They were rather occupied by his entourage. In sorry condition, those buildings are currently offices and residence unit for some staff of the Ellembelle District Assembly.
Some walled public buildings near the African Liberation Square (as I know it) have been encumbered by a former president. Up to midnight, January 7, 2001, probably from December 31, 1981, the street leading to the international WAEC office had been blocked from public access with concrete stuffed barrels. It’s a site that could house dozens of public officers in tower buildings.
There’s a big house or houses with something like burnt brick wall at Ajiringanor. Next to it is the NTHC gated community. A Senior once showed me large tracts of land belonging to one once a have-not.
The Kanda former GNTC building and others around Accra, I don’t know outside Accra, are privately owned. I am not so sure the one at Osu, so close to the sacred cemetery was successfully appropriated like the others. Maybe not; because I remember some Telco raised a tower there and was made to pull it down by my royal Ga in-laws.
Not to be forgotten is another building by the riverside close to bridgetown, Tefle.
If the aforementioned together is owned by one person, or a couple of persons or a family, I don’t want to be ‘accountability and probityed.’ That’ll be a joke!
Once, a retired senior minister advanced some interesting points about corruption. It was the day before he was named the finance minister-designate. He was addressing a joint meeting of the Association of Alumni of Canadian Universities in Ghana and the Ghana-Canada Chamber of Commerce. Someone had sought his views on checking corruption in government.
It was not corruption but greed, he noted. He had an anecdote. A civil servant would claim poor salary would make him homeless in retirement. He would find ways and means to put up a house in Accra. After that, it would be another house in his hometown. Then in his wife’s hometown, and so on.
I feel strongly the Kufuor administration was the least corrupt in the Fourth Republic. My hunch is guided by the fact that virtually all his ministers owned their own houses and most likely means of transportation. They might have added on to those by the time they left office. But at least they had something before public office.
The post-2008 governance culture of owning a V8 automobile and a mansion by the end of one’s term in public office has made nonsense of accountability and probity. A ‘career’ as dining hall prefect qualifies one to be a minister with opportunity to loot to acquire V8 and mansion.
Congresspeople had deliberately crafted a constitutional asset declaration of intense translucence. Accountability and probity is publicly declaring assets on January 1, 1982, and again on January 6, 1993, then repeating more declaration on January 6, 2001. There’s neither accountability nor probity about hidden assets. It’s so unfair to posthumously circulate on WhatsApp self-righteous propaganda that you did not have a foreign account all the time you were in government.
Of course, if you control the resources of the motherland, including all the money that is made from gold, cocoa, non-traditional exports, others, you can pay the fees of your children in foreign educational institutions even when you don’t have foreign account.
Whoever talked accountability and probity in mourning must have seen or heard corruption. In 2016, it was unthinkable there would come a time Addo Preman would be labelled the ‘mother serpent of corruption.’ That suggests that, pre-emptively, whether one is scribing or ‘doormanning’ for him, with or without job title or description, there’s the need to take a cue and abandon grabbing to save his name from further denigration.
Results of the 2020 election show people my age, not too far from his, don’t seem terribly impressed by his anti-corruption fight. It’s not worse than congress but the fear is that it’s creating an opening for congress, the devil Lucifer of corruption, to return to destroy everything he has achieved.
If you are leading a motherland, they say: “The reality might be somewhat different, but it doesn’t matter a damn. What matters is the perception.”
By Kwasi Ansu-Kyeremeh