What An Address!

Last week, Ghanaians were treated to another State-of-The-Nation Address, a constitutional requirement, whose principal attributes are sobriety and verity. When the annual routine is however characterized by drab humour such as how to kick penalties and the Ashanti phobia, seriousness-minded Ghanaians begin to ask whether they are listening to a comedy or a concert party. In the face of genuine challenges staring the country in the face, as evidenced in the unnerving fiscal situation of the state, the President could be said to be fiddling as Rome is burning. Little wonder that by the time he was done with the presentation, there were doubts in some quarters as to whether he really read something from a prepared speech by his speechwriters or it was an extempore delivery even as he held on to a script. Some could not resist the impulse to yawn from boredom, occasioned by an uninspiring and hopeless piece of oral rendition. That was the reality of listening to our President last week. Be that as it may, the President�s State-of-The-Nation Address was short in substance but rich in trivialities. Untruths and deliberate distortions of the realities reared their heads in the speech as in sprouts of seeds during germination on a rich humus-rich soil. He made a mess of the free school uniforms refrain as he employed arithmetically erroneous statistics to make his government look good. Perhaps, he took a cue from Baba Jamal�s theory of making government look good by all means, including lying. Deliberately refusing to point at the role of the newfound oil in the good-looking fiscal figures posted this year, President Mills sought to make it look as though whatever progress was made emanated from his outstanding performance. He described the figures as unprecedented in the country. The single digit inflationary figures are yet to make any logical sense to the ordinary Ghanaian for whom all the highly fallacious and politically underpinned presentations do not mean a dime as far as they continue to live in a situation of runaway inflation of sorts. In other words, the single digit mantra is inconsistent with the prevailing market feature of permanently rising prices. Under such a state of denial, addressing the real challenges cannot be anywhere near. It was regrettable that the President dwelt once more on the frightening Ashanti project, having been caught in the unsettling Wikileaks reference expressing similar sentiments in the infamous �the Ashanti project is frightening.� Although he sought to calm the nerves of germane personalities that he means no harm, he missed it because it is now ingrained in the minds of many that he is a man with a massive ethnocentric tendency. What a State-of-the-Nation Address that was.