Power for sale
One voter, one set of cooking utensils with a candidate’s picture shamelessly embossed on it. One voter, one fat envelope containing ‘T & T’ of a whopping GH¢1, 000.
No sane being will pay another to serve them. Hence, if a politician pays you to vote for them, it goes without saying that they can pay themselves more (of course with your resources) when elected into office.
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Until a nation returns to a place where elections are not regarded as an investment, our resources will continue to be regarded as people’s return on investment.
Politics is not philanthropy. There is a bigger, selfish purpose for every cedi politicians part away with. When they are doling out loads of cash just so you vote for them, know that they will always find a way to recoup their investment when they get into office.
Like the devil, whatever a politician gives with their right hand with a camera, they take back with their left in camera.
Leadership is service and service is sacrifice. So, when people are paying to serve you, it is obvious the only sacrifice they will be making is to avail themselves to loot your resources.
If people will do anything to be voted into office, it should tell you where their interest lies — the nation’s coffers.
It’s an irony to have people wanting to buy their way through into serving us. If there were no benefits attached to such service, such people wouldn’t have sacrificed that much.
If they will invest their lifetime savings into an election, how on earth do we expect them to have the nation at heart when in office!? It becomes a NEED to first recover what they lost!
When people pay to lead you, they will lead you to pay them back when they get into office. If it is their business to pay you to vote for them, you become a partner in their business of looting.
They pay you a pittance but loot in abundance. You give them the opportunity to dig further the grave of future generations.
If people’s money influences you to vote for them, you don’t only sell our power but our future, too. Our systems will continue not to work.
The same corrupt people with different political colours reshuffle every four years to plunder the nation further.
Our future, as a people, is going to be steered by the calibre of leaders we opt for. How developed we may ever largely depend on the people we vote for.
It is a pity, thus, if we shortchange ourselves by going in for peanuts from a politician while we suffer for the rest of our lives.
When people treat election as an investment, they treat their position as their profit. All funds that could have been channeled into investing into posterity are invested into their family.
What is due the citizenry, they are denied. They make the rights of citizens look like privileges. The nation’s wealth is wasted and opportunities are abused.
Doors are slammed in the faces of non-partisan Ghanaians and everything is politicized; from corona to voters register!
It is about time we all came to the ealization that we are as guilty as those who keep raping this 63-year-old nation. After all, we put them there. We entertained them. In fact, we fall for their deception every election year.
What a nation becomes largely depends on their calibre of leaders and their calibre of leaders largely depends on their calibre of voters.
Until voters sell their power, corrupt politicians can never get into power.
Kobina Ansah is a Ghanaian playwright and
Chief Scribe of Scribe Communications
(www.scribecommltd.com), an Accra-based writing firm.
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