Political quantity surveyors and other matters!
Today, I really wanted to treat extensively the new political campaign mantra of profligate overexpenditure on new public projects such as roads, interchanges, hospitals, housing estates, and other visible projects dotted all over the country, to deflate and condemn the structures themselves as unworthy and unnecessary, and the response of President John Mahama to these critics.
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I have, however, as usual, been waylaid by the extremely sad and wholly unexpected news of the murder of the Member of Parliament for Abuakwa North, the Honourable Joseph Boakye Danquah-Adu. I did not know him personally, but I can count myself as a friend to his older brother Frank of CALBANK, and some of his cousins. Therefore, I am equally bereaved.
The MP’s death has demonstrated beyond doubt, what some of us rightly feel should be our form of government to deal with national issues in these times. Our democracy, and the freedoms our constitution guarantees, have simply become the foundation for the most obtuse forms of personal and public irresponsibility and complete lack of principle in our political conduct. And in this atmosphere, I am sorry to observe that those closest to the late departed MP via his party have been most at fault.
Lurid accounts of what transpired in the house of the deceased, security arrangements or lack thereof, and possible lines of investigation propounded by people with no knowledge of police work but determined to force their unsupported opinions on us, are carelessly and handily bandied about in the media as if death is of no consequence at all.
The death of a person through any means at all is a time of great sadness for his or her beloved ones, but a sudden death of this nature acts as a condign brake on our usual sense of comfort and security that comes from the normal expectation that death is a preserve of the terminally sick and aged members of our families. Please, please, some of us are simply talking too much. We must leave the police to do their work, and not to foreclose fruitful and profitable lines of valid inquiry by proffering suggestions in the public space.
This realisation only brought to mind the fact that my late secondary school headmaster, the formidable OK Monney, could argue successfully, prior to the mandatory 12 lashes, that a student who was present at Wednesday morning school assembly without the mandatory hymnbook for singing practice was actually not present, but in town having broken bounds, in illegal clothing! I forgive myself the sacrilege for having the following thoughts regarding Honourable Adu’s unexpected death.
I note with curious interest, the predilection for the New Patriotic Party (NPP) persisting in describing such a tragic unexpected event as ‘’foul play’’. This phrase is employed only in cases of normal death made strange by some inexplicable circumstance. But this case is a clear case of murder! So why such a repetitive description? May Honourable Adu rest in perfect peace.
Political quantity surveying
Which brings me back to my beef for today; political quantity surveying. My readers will recall I did a similar piece on a sweet and witty turn of phrase by the president of the Supreme Court panel which heard the election petition in 2013; illegal political galamsey. If I remember correctly, Justice William Atugubah was referring to the journalists and commentators on the case who had taken to openly scandalising and libelling the judges and the court sitting on the case, for which crude behaviour, a few of them were hauled before the court and dealt with.
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President Mahama last week spent some time explaining what was the new craze in sections of our polity when he was cutting the sod to mark the commencement of work on the three interchanges planned by his hardworking government for the Kasoa section of the Accra-Cape Coast highway.
Kasoangariba, to use its proper name, has grown to such an extent as to become the fastest-growing peri-urban settlement in West Africa, and traffic has naturally developed to create problems for commuters on that stretch and beyond to the Western Region and Cote d’Ivoire, and vice versa to the Greater Accra and Volta regions and Togo and beyond. The earlier successful launch of the book detailing the numerous infrastructural projects of President Mahama’s government had succeeded in removing the charge of incompetence levelled against him by the NPP.
But this particular project has attracted the usual criticism of the opposition NPP led by the flag bearer himself who had to be corrected, rather shamefacedly, by the NPP ranking parliamentary committee MP who happened to be a high official in the highways authority before entering parliament! Therefore, President Mahama must have felt the need to lay to rest this old charge of profligate spending urged on us to deflate the project and to sow doubt in us as to their usefulness to us.
Of course, such an attack raises the logical issue of what would an NPP administration succeeding this government do with the projects so characterised in the period of campaigning in the event the NPP wins the 2016 elections? If uncompleted, would the project be discontinued and torn down, or if completed, left unused? The last option comes to mind when we recall the campaign of 2008 when some NDC campaigners promised to make sure the extremely expensive Flagstaff House would not be used.
The Flagstaff House is being used by the NDC government of President Mahama, after an initial promise of a security overview and related matters. The NPP must answer the question if the project’s usefulness to the public is more important than the cost? Having answered this question, it should then proceed to persuade us why not only was the Aveyime project continued, but those they convicted, were pardoned by President Kufuor, after a lurid propaganda condemning the project, its Ghanaian promoters and disturbing the polity with such a pointless exercise in political gamesmanship and terror?
Political quantity surveying is political terrorism for the sheer love of malice and vindictiveness, and not a serious sustainable focus on nation building.
aburaepistle@hotmail.com.