Former President John Mahama
Politics when practised with sincerity and with service to the people as the primary goal is a noble occupation.
Unfortunately, insincere politicians have jumped into the fray; their intention anything but the aforementioned moral principles. Reducing politics to mere propaganda – the stock-in-trade of the charlatans aforementioned – is what gives the occupation the unappealing impression in the minds of discerning members of society.
Former President John Mahama and others like him fit the billing of bad politicians, their attributes including the peddling of untruths.
He has chosen as a subject, cocoa, the lifeline of our economy, for his dirty campaign tour of the areas where the cash crop is produced in large measure yet ignored in his so-called infrastructural agenda which never was. That was when he was at the helm. Even when the man who is now President complained about the bad state of the roads in the Western Region, the then President John Mahama told him that at the time he was driving on the road network he might have fallen asleep and could not have observed the absence of the potholes.
The former President should stop lying and look at the statistics of a post-Mahama cocoa output: these are verifiable facts devoid of the contagion of mendacity.
For a man who chose to fly around the country when he was in power to avoid the bumpy cocoa roads he refused to upgrade to spew such garbage in a useless bid to incite farmers of the golden pod against a government which sincerely has them at heart is evidence about how politics is being debased by persons of his ilk.
Politics like priesthood is about championing the cause of the flock their welfare so sacrosanct that they should never be toyed with NDC-grade propaganda.
Doing anything to champion their parochial cause and thus giving politics a bad name is an attribute of bad politicians. Not exposing such characters is not an acceptable option under our circumstances.
But for the good politicians still standing and serving God and country as their priestly compatriots are doing politics would have been completely thrown to the dogs with no trace of goodliness. Like politics, the priesthood is also suffering from the infestation of crooks in the cassock.
The former President’s weird manner of sulking is heart-wrenching. What he failed to do about cocoa production and which others are doing must be prompting insomnia in him.
Politics is without doubt about convincing people to join one’s cause but this should however be done with objectivity and candour as the cornerstones.
If the former President has no kind words for the feat recorded so far in cocoa production even with the worrying effect of the swollen shoot infestation, let him shut up.
Embarrassments which come with spewing untruths should not be the lot of a former President. When a former President fails to live up to the billing of a statesman and is enmeshed in the opposite of goodness, he prompts questions about how Ghanaians came to be bestowed with such a person as President. He is even vying for another opportunity to come and disserve; with such an appalling record?
The Akufo-Addo administration, like all human institutions, cannot be perfect but can, of course, flaunt its enviable achievements against the non-starter of the previous order. No payments have been made to cocoa roads which were not constructed. No bad and untested chemical inputs were imported into the country which substantial amounts of monies were paid.
The Ivorians are not magicians to produce so much cocoa. It is about commitment and good leadership which we now have hence the appreciable rise in cocoa output in excess of what former President’s recorded during his tenure.
Politicians are their own enemies. The former President has fired too many shots at his foot since he started his second term bid campaign. When the wounds become gangrene and very soon, it would be too late to reverse the effects.
Propaganda has its wages. Goebbels under Hitler was a master of the ruse game but when the game ended, his story was a miserable footnote in world history.