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The heading simply means �Oh Dear, What a Mess!� Mrs. Nana Konadu Agyeman Rawlings is not my kind of politician by any measure, because I have always deeply resented the way she and the husband have succeeded in infesting Ghanaian politics with so much bitterness, hatred, acrimony and anguish. Yes, they have poisoned the atmosphere of Ghanaian politics! For close to 20 years, they played one tribe against the other; they preached envy against anyone who had been successful through honest means; they sullied the hard-earned reputation of decent citizens of this country without any justification; they sought to impose on us some outlandish ideology imported from Cuba, Libya, Surinam and all sorts of corners of the globe; they glorified indiscipline and extolled all the things that our forefathers despised. However, I do recall a characterisation of the Kufuor government that she offered in one of her effusions, which I have since kept in my mind. She described our government as the messiest piece of thing, which by her definition, had ever happened to our beloved Republic. Please forgive me Madam, if I have paraphrased you wrongly, even though I recall distinctly that you described the NPP administration at the time with words to that effect. As I cast my mind back to that picture that was described as chaotic, I wonder how she will describe the Mills administration now. My best guess is that she is lost for words. What is going on in this country is indeed beyond description. I was particularly alarmed when the President of Ghana �ordered� his security agencies to investigate the claim being made by Herbert Mensah, of being aware of a tape on which the president is allegedly heard discussing how an amount of GH�90m should be distributed in favour of his campaign to win the endorsement of his party as their flag-bearer for the 2012 presidential election. My horror did not stem from the fact that the president was seeking to clarify a matter, which in his view, could cast some serious aspersion on the widely touted image of a man of a saintly integrity. Even though some of us have very serious doubts about the impression that is so much paraded around the country with such careless abandon, there seems to be no doubt in the minds of many people, particularly the very gullible fraction of our population, that we are being ruled by an angel. The horror stemmed from the speed and alacrity with which the President went into full action to ask for Herbert Mensah to be investigated. Have we not all been in this country when some members of the President�s government have grotesquely accused the presidential candidate of the NPP of being a drug peddler? Why has he not caused the security personnel to investigate that kind of cruel accusation as a means of restoring the impeccable and undoubted integrity of someone like Nana Akufo-Addo, who has for many years, in fact the best part of his life, fought for what is right in this country when he Mills was hiding in some obscurity? Has our President never heard all the careless accusations of bribery and corruption levelled at some high level officials of the previous NPP administration by characters in his administration such as Sam Ablakwa Okudzeto, Fiifi Kwetey, Kobby Acheampong,James Agyenim Boateng? Why has the pastor not asked the security personnel to challenge his underlings for the appropriate evidence? Only recently, a leading member of his NDC, called Ras Mubarak or so, has accused Sam Okudzeto of having constructed a US$20,000 fish pond or so for his step-father. According to Mr. Mubarak, this took place at a time when the government of Mr. Mills had frozen the salaries of senior political appointees. Why has the President, up till now, not asked the BNI to go into the matter, given that this boy had never worked to earn even a pesewa before he became a Deputy Minister? Where on earth did he get that huge amount of money to please his step-father? Has the distinguished Professor of law not heard that one of his junior ministers has just finished a twin house in some place in the Brong Ahafo Region? Is the pastor president not aware that one of his numerous aides collected some billions of cedis for some unspecified purpose from the Ministry of Information? Was our President asleep when J.J. Rawlings said publicly that this government was pregnant with very corrupt officials? Why did he not cause the BNI or the CID chaps to interrogate Mr. Rawlings for his evidence? A very reputed wire service, Bloomberg, on April 11, 2011, informed the whole world that our oil industry is characterised by lack of transparency, a coded expression for outright corruption. We are told that our officials negotiate exploration and other contracts in private rather than through open tenders, and that our negotiators have too much latitude in negotiations. These are very serious allegations! Why is the President not asking the security agencies to get to the bottom of that very depressing Bloomberg story? If indeed it is the case that some officials are already having a field day with our fledgling oil and gas industry, then we are in trouble because we will soon be mired up in some Nigeria Delta-like situation in the Western Region. Does our President not think that a matter of this nature is more important than how he can win some minor contest between him on one hand and Mrs. Rawlings and Spio Garbrah on the other? In brief we are witnessing some Russian roulette kind of politics. The President gives the impression that he is working full throttle when in fact he is busy about nothing. Meanwhile, the accusations of sleaze are flying left and right. From the bottom of his heart, does our President believe that what happened on May 5, when he went to his party to collect ordinary nomination forms, was part of his way of delivering his so-called Better Ghana agenda? What on this hot earth were some members of the Council of State doing out there? Why did he allow or encourage almost all the cabinet ministers of his government to troop to their party Headquarters? What was that meant to achieve? To intimidate Mrs. Rawlings or to show us where power lies in Ghana? It was such a shameful spectacle! It is rather so funny and sad how the multitude of spokespersons have justified the whole spectacle. All the sporadic pomp and pageantry notwithstanding, a very clear but disturbing picture is emerging; in fact it has been on the radar for some time now, that we have a President who is either not interested in how this country is being run, or he is so incompetent as to be unable to understand what is going on around him with such regularity alacrity. Our President is increasingly constructing for himself a personification of a bundle of contradictions. He is doing raw Machiavellian politics laced with raw opportunism; Pure and simple. How else can one explain the latest revelation by the Chairman of the Mrs. Rawlings campaign that the Mills people are obstructing Mrs. Rawlings�s supporters from simply endorsing by signing her filing papers? Why should she not have the courtesy of having her supporters being allowed to exercise their right to support a candidate of their choice in any given contest? That is quite strange even by the standards of the NDC. I should add very quickly though that perhaps we shall all learn some fundamental lessons from what is being visited on Mrs. Konadu Agyemang Rawlings. One is tempted to recall her arrogant display of raw power when she was at the pinnacle of authority in this country when her husband was the master of all that he surveyed. One cannot easily forget the disgusting way she caused misery to befall the family of the poor boy who was alleged to have developed some romance with her daughter. She should one day tell the whole country what it is like to be at both ends�giving and receiving. But that is by the way. As has been said over and over again, especially by senior people within his own political family, President Mills appears to be very tolerant of sleaze when his lieutenants are at the centre, but at his most pontifical and hypocritical self when his political opponents are involved. He is persistently frustrating the Ghanaian genie by strangulation, lowering the bar for achievement and success. The other morning it was very pathetic listening to his Deputy Information Minister parroting what he claimed were the sign posts of Mills� vision for Ghana. It was so mediocre and lacking in bigness that one could not help but bow down one�s head in deep melancholy and shame. Is this all we can achieve as a country, when the likes of the Malaysias and Singapores, countries with which we attained independence in the same year, and with similar historical experiences, are dreaming real big and striving to kick out poverty from their countries. The gauntlet thrown by Nana Konadu Agyemang Rawlings has been sincerely welcomed by many Ghanaians, not necessarily because she is any better, but on balance she is a jewel in the NDC crown, relative to our pastoral president. As a colleague put it cynically, there are two things that our President can be very proud of in his Ghana, the rate at which he has managed to increase the cost of living and the level to which he has succeeded in increasing the number of unemployed young persons, especially those with tertiary education. Mr. Mills must indeed be a very proud person to have achieved these successes. Mr. President has also added some spice to our politics. Here we have a man who was a complete ghost in the politics of our country until he was literally plucked from that obscurity and catapulted to the next but one position of this country�s perking order. He has taken us full circle; he is now fighting his mentor-in-chief and has succeeded in weaning from the mentor and his wife all their close associates. Now all these people who were literally feeding from the largesse of Madam have become her bitterest enemies, and tripping over each other by demonstrating how much they hated her all along. Betty Mould (yes!), Sherry Ayittey (yes!), Cecilia Johnson (yes!), Fiifi Kwetey (oh yes!), ET Mensah (Correct!), Vanderpuye (yes sir!), �Dr.� Hanna Bissiw (indeed!), have all joined the queue to demonstrate their disloyalty to the Rawlingses. Of course we have been told that some regional organisers of the infamous 31 December monster have also made their voices clear. Any one remembers the last days of the CPP? That is pretty curious stuff, isn�t it? But that is politics, a la NDC for those who did not know it. Wonders, they say, will never end. All we can do is to wait silently to see the end of this melodrama of Ghanaian politics, courtesy His Excellency, Doctor Professor John Evans Fiifi Atta Mills, Esq., PhD. By all standards, he has raised the level of chaos in Ghana to a historically high level and we salute him. Oh, la la , quel chaos!