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FOR many Ghanaians, President John Dramani Mahama’s anger at critics who say he is incompetent as President is the last straw of a “dying president” who sees his tenure as the occupant of the Highest Office very much numbered. Otherwise such effusions are needless and at best can be described as infantile.

PERHAPS, the only way to re-assure some of his own disillusioned party supporters, who had come out openly to express their dissatisfaction about his style of leadership is to take that unnecessary swipe at his critics at a secluded party programme. However, in this day and age, very private conversations held at inner chamber of bedrooms have the potential of being made public.

SO if the President ever imagined parochially that his effusions were going to remain within the four walls of the Trade Fair Pavilion where he met the National Democratic Congress (NDC) faithful then he thought wrongly. A competent leader certainly would have broadened his scope in such circumstance.

HEAR the President addressing the NDC supporters as part of his Changing Lives and Transforming Ghanatour at the Trade Fair Centre in Accra: “Did you hear Bawumia say incompetent Mahama administration? You’ve never held any responsible position anywhere near the presidency before; you don’t know what it takes like to be president.

I’ll take that word from Kufuor or from Rawlings because they’ve been there before. All of you guys have never ever come near the presidency. Do you know what it takes to be a president? And you stand and say incompetent Mahama administration.”

ACCORDING to the President, it’s only two people in this country that can comment on his performance or his tenure as President. These are former Presidents Jerry John Rawlings and John Agyekum Kufuor as if to suggest that he will need only the two ex-Presidents to vote for him or not in his pursuit of a second term office as President of the Republic of Ghana.

INDEED we won’t bother our readers with similar comments the President had made in different capacities to sitting presidents because that would mean flogging a dead goat. Although he himself once alluded to the fact that he is a dead goat, we would not dignify another of his own defaming statements or speeches.

RATHER the paper would want to take the President through the paces to point out to him why he is more than incompetent. In fact he is a total failure; and that his incompetence is unparalleled or legendary in the history of the Ghanaian presidency.

INDEED we are only juxtaposing what the President and his cronies had said about dealing with the myriad of problems confronting our country and the reality of the progress or otherwise that they have made in that regard.

Education

FOR now many Ghanaians do not know the position of the Mahama government on education. The other day it was quality education; yesterday, it was free education to some Ghanaians at the secondary level and many other confusing models.

ONE of such is that the Mahama administration through its spokesperson, Okudzeto-Ablakwa, said by September 2015, the government would have built 50 model Senior High Schools. At the last count, around the predicted period, we had about two; the first being the one built at Prof. Mills’ hometown, Ekumfi Otuam, ostensibly to cash in on public sympathy because general election is barely a year away. The other one is at Tepa in the Ashanti region.

SO what happened to the remaining 48? Mr President, if this is not a mark of incompetence, then what is it? We’ve even pardoned your earlier promise that your government would build 200 of such model schools before you leave office. Certainly that can never be achieved. We are indeed modest in our expectation.

WE are not least surprised. This is a President who assured Ghanaians that the current power crisis would have ended in March 2014. Today, the country is prone to darkness than any other era with no solution in sight. Mr. President, you claim, you have eradicated all schools under trees. It’s really pathetic that the President of the Republic can look us in the face and tell such gargantuan lie.

THERE are many areas even in the capital region that pupils still go to public schools under trees at Kwabenya, Dome and other suburbs in Accra. For other areas, particularly in Northern Ghana, the pathetic state of our public schools is only a way of our current generation re-living what their predecessors suffered in the past with no sight of improvement.

WE are not surprised that in this day of the 21st Century, some public schools in Ghana are scoring zero in their Basic School Certificate Examinations. Mr. President, kindly visit the Gomoa, Ajumako and Agona areas in the Central region, Kumawu in Ashanti and many parts of the Northern regions to ascertain the truth about your education and stop relying on the lies being fed you by your men and women.

OF course Mr. President, you can also not be oblivious of these perennial miseries that parents and pupils go through in these areas. After all you were once an Assembly man, served as Member of Parliament (MP), served as both junior and cabinet minister. So we ask: What significant improvement have you made to the country’s education sector as President? If you should be sincere, you would agree that you’ve rather compounded our misery. If this is not incompetent then Today believes you should rather consider yourself a total failure.

Health

IS the President saying he has fixed or reduced the problems bedevilling the country’s health sector? Perhaps, he is only being consumed in the trickery of his predecessors where they put up new buildings that they called wards to cover-up the rottenness beneath such new edifice at our hospitals.

OTHERWISE what other adjectives can the President use to describe the state of our hospitals where expectant women deliver on floors, surgeries are done with candles because there are no electricity in many public hospitals; patients queue for surgery with some ending up dying. For us at Today it’s more than incompetent! It’s callousness on the part of the President not to deal with the fundamental problems confronting our hospitals; but adopt some cosmetic acts of putting up buildings at these hospitals just to score cheap political points. Elsewhere our President would have been prosecuted for causing unnecessary deaths.

IN the annals of Ghana’s history, medical practitioners had never embarked on a strike as long as what was experienced under John Dramani Mahama. You ask the doctors and they tell us they don’t trust the President and so would not renege on their action, despite the fact that people were dying.

THE only remedy that Mahama and his cohorts could adopt was to raise public sentiments against the doctors and a stance that only bothered on sheer bravado. In the end Mahama buckled! So what really is the leadership quality of our President in this circumstance? Did he not anticipate that the doctors would not budge? The fact that he only caved in to good wisdom after many lives were lost clearly tells us on this paper the kind of President that we have: an insensitive and clueless President who is way below incompetence.

WE are judging the President this manner because today, the demands of the doctors had been met at the expense of precious lost lives. If the President knew he was going to cave in why that unnecessary intransigence in the first place?

Roads

THE President prides himself in building good roads. Interesting! Every Ghanaian president under the 4th Republic prides himself of building good roads. So why is John Dramani Mahama also claiming he is building roads. If indeed the roads built by Rawlings, Kufuor and John Mills were of high standard, we believe John Dramani Mahama would not have bothered himself with building new roads; because there would be none to build. His concentration would have been in other areas.

THE fact of the matter is that all these Heads of State played the road politics just like Mahama is doing today. Almost all the roads that he claims he has built have began developing man-holes. A typical example is the Bawdie-Asankragua road. Is that competency? So Mr. President when you put up a facade of building good roads all in an attempt to win votes like your predecessors did, how do you want to be labelled?

TODAY many NDC functionaries are glorifying Mahama for building interchanges at Kwame Nkrumah Circle and Kasoa as if no President has ever done that in Ghana. But Today believes the President has in recent times been visiting Dubai and other countries in the Gulf State and indeed saw what really a sky scrapper is. Can the patchy thing being done in these two areas be considered as really 21st century modern day interchange?

PERHAPS we would not blame the President but Ghanaians. We have lived in mediocrity to the extent that mediocre stuffs have become hallmark of our landmarks that are hailed overboard. But the real issue is not even about these 18th Century Sky Scrapers.

WE are spending close to $160 million for the construction of the Kasoa interchange when in actual fact these monies could have been spent on two or more of such projects. The same applied to the Kwame Nkrumah Overpass which a whopping 74.88 million Euros is being spent on. So who is supervising these projects and has the person accounted properly on the amounts being used for these two projects?

Corruption

ACCORDING to the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), the very institution that Mahama and his people hailed as the best thing to have happened to the country after the 2012 presidential debate, the presidency under President Mahama is second most corrupt institution in the country after the Police Service. If one considers the fact that the Police Service has gained the notoriety as the legally recognised corrupt entity, then in such instance, the presidency come tops in the corruption index. Who heads the presidency? Is it not Mahama?

SO wherein lies his competence? He should be concerned about the corruption tag at his office and see how best to redeem his battered image than to go on a wild goose chase about people who see him as incompetent.

BUT why would Mahama’s people not be labelled as the most corrupt? He simply does not have hold on the size of huge government officials. He currently has 83 officials of State. The breakdown is as follows: Ministers 28, Deputies 35, Regional Ministers 10; deputies 10 with daily growth of presidential staffers, some of who have reduced the Flagstaff House into a boxing arena.

ALL these officials are scrambling for bits of the national cake. And with little or no strict supervision, they have reduced the Flagstaff House to a haven of looting. No wonder one judge once posited that Mahama’s government has become an avenue for “loot, create and share.” What apt description of Mahama and his looting brigade.

Mr. President, should we carry you shoulder high for such crass incompetence?

Loans

THE Mahama administration has had the record of borrowing than any other administration since the country attained nationhood in 1957. The NDC administration under John Evans Atta Mills and John Dramani Mahama has within a period of six years contracted a whopping $27 billion as at last year. This brought the country’s total debt portfolio to GHC70 billion as at September 2014. We are not talking about what we’ve contracted this year.

YET Mahama is perhaps the luckiest of all the Presidents we have had in the 4th Republic. Internally, the country has been able to generate $2.167 billion through oil revenue. With the borrowing and the oil revenue, we still run to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for some bailout that came with it some austerity measures.

So Mr. President is this the country you promised us. To us on this paper, we believe people have been modest in judging you as incompetent. We believe such sloppy performance should have warranted your impeachment.

Period!