These NPP Pretenders Must Give Us A Break

I set off writing this piece, wondering if former President John Agyekum Kufuor�s administration would be remembered as one of the worst thing to ever happen to this country. I concluded this believing that the Kufuor�s administration would be remembered not just as one of a poor moral level of leadership and incompetence, but also one with a blurred vision. Vision blurred by intellectual dullness and moral depravity. Since the overthrow of the first President of this nation, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, and until the coming into office of President John Evans Atta Mills, Ghanaians did not know what it is like to be led. Today the good leadership of President Mills is equipping Ghanaians, and the citizenry is now capable of spotting the difference between a bad idea and a good one, a good leader and a bad leader, a corrupt leader and an honest leader, a smart leader and a dumb leader, a unifier and a divider, a vindictive leader and a forgiver, a morally bankrupt leader and a true statesman etc. For Martin Luther King Jnr, nothing is more dangerous than conscientious stupidity and sincere mediocrity. The more I listen to former President Kufuor eulogize his achievements and the direction he took this country, while in office, the more I marvel at his sincere ignorance. The more I listen to members of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) sing the praises of ex-President Kufuor, the more I understand their conscientious stupidity. Instead of showing a way out of their state of mediocrity, members of the NPP through their barrage of what I would call �dangerous-good news� is simply re-enforcing rapid deterioration in the quality of their discourse. I will start with the most obnoxious dangerous-good news, which is that the 51 million Ghana Cedis, judgment debt paid to businessman Alfred Agbesi Woyome; have become the campaign message of the NPP going into the 2012 polls. This became clear when a fortnight ago, the Parliamentary aspirants for Dome Kwabenya Constituency, Adwoa Sarfo, at her campaign launch provided the opportunity for anybody who mattered in the party to address the teeming supporters and speaker after speaker, said nothing apart from Alfred Woyome and judgement debt. The sad part for me was ex-President Kufuor also exposing his ignorance and lack of understanding of governance even though he was in office for eight years (2001-208). No doubt he is going down in history as one of the worse President this country has ever had. A disclaimer is appropriate at this juncture, this are not my words, but those of Mustapha Hamid. This is the verdict of Mustapha Hamid, an aide to Nana Akufo-Addo, the presidential candidate of the NPP, on the personality and the eight years stewardship of John Agyekum Kufuor. �Whether we are struggling through school or not is as a result of the judgment we made as to which course to pursue. One of my favourite quotations from Shakespeare is the one that states that, �there is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the floods, leads to fortune, omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and misery�. The example of marriage and choice of course are examples of everyday judgments that ordinary people make. But when it comes to a president or even a former president, the scale of the operations changes dramatically. �This is because a president�s higher than ordinary status makes the consequences of his judgment enormous. As I stated earlier, a President embodies the fears, hopes and aspirations of the people he leads. He is the commander in chief of the armed forces. If he makes a wrong judgment and pulls the trigger, the lives of millions of citizens will be bound in shallows and misery�. He continued that �for me therefore one of the important qualities a person must possess in order to be president is judgment. And when I say judgment, I mean that he or she must judge correctly most of the time. Otherwise he or she destroys the aspirations and hopes of the people that he or she leads. In the curse of former President Kufuor�s tenure he was hit by certain controversies which in the future will be central to the verdict that the jurors give on his tenure as President�. It is sad how we choose our leaders, whose judgements have come into question, more than I care to remember. Mustapha Hamid fell short of questioning the judgement of former President Kufuor; he actually questioned his integrity and what the hell he was doing as the number one citizen of the land. In one of my earlier articles I have had cause to question the sort and caliber of people the NPP throws up as their flagbearers and sometimes as party executives. As a student of history I have asked myself many times why the NPP, does not put the interest of the generality of Ghanaians first before they embark on any journey to elect representatives both as the leadership of the party i.e. party executives and their presidential candidates. In the history of that tradition, John Agyekum, was the only person to have had the opportunity of serving two-four years terms as head of state. Unfortunately, however, like his forebears, he maliciously, with intent and purpose, decided to surround himself with leeches who helped themselves to the bounties which is supposed to be for the use of a better word the national cake, that must go round regardless of tribe or qualification. Mr. Kufuor entrenched his greed, and sought immortality; posterity would not forgive him, his cronies and all Ghanaians who queued from dawn to sunset to vote for this man Kufuor, who thought everything is about money and that the more wealth he amasses the more relevant he becomes in the political discourse of the world. What he forgot was that when mention is made of Nelson Mandela of South Africa, Winston Churchill of Great Britain, Abraham Lincoln and Bill Clinton of United States, the Dalai Lama and many others, he will be nowhere near them. All these personalities are remembered, respected and worshiped not because of how much money belonging to the people they had stolen or how deep their pockets were, but rather how their policies, programmes, temperaments, lifestyles, and reign impacted positively on the lives of their people. Important political figures do not write their own history and sit in judgment of their own actions: they are accountable to their citizens and later to historians for their actions. Ex-President Kufuor, decided to decorate himself and his cronies with a national disgrace called honour, and parted themselves on the back for a job well-done. Yet the debt he left behind is more than that of all the leaders we have had since independence. He has also forgotten so soon that all the problems of judgement debt today are what they are because he presided over a corrupt and a vindictive regime, where people were shown where power lay. Today Kufuor could also be talking about judgment debt. Somebody who was bereft of judgement, questioning someone�s judgement haba. Have we not being insulted enough. If former President Kufuor had being nothing but half a good President, this back and forth movement concerning the �serial judgement debt�, including that paid to Alfred Agbesi Woyome would not have reared its ugly head. Perhaps, for us as Ghanaians is to say enough is enough of these hypocrites and greedy achiness, who are only interested in how much they steal than how much they have done for us. We would forgive ex-President Kufur, if he could tell us what he did in eight years as the head of state, rather than playing to the gallery and pretending all our problems are from Woyome. I stand corrected but I smell mischief on his (Kufuor�s) part to do in, Nana Akufo-Addo.