Is there too much confusion in the land?
“You may be among the willing. Who work for the unknowing. Doing the impossible for the ungrateful. Who have for so long, done so much with so little, that you feel like giving it all up. But I say to you: never give it up. Don’t say honesty doesn’t pay or patriotism is a hollow word.
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It is because of you that we still have a nation. That posterity can still hope for a future.’’
I copied the above quotation from my friend Mike Dokosi because it succinctly captures my mood today. From where I stand, there is way too much confusion in what is happening in Ghana these days. This confusion has affected both raw policy and its implementation, and obscured ideological precision. Is there a method in this confusion?
Let me share with you a frank discussion with a top government official about the ends of policy imprecision and implementation in respect of only one policy concept loudly proclaimed by the government, Free SHS.
He readily agreed that the Free SHS concept as spelt out in its current form is both unworkable and a betrayal of the original promise as stated in the ruling party’s manifesto of providing free and universal coverage for all SHS students regardless of which year they are in.
I riposted that what is the likely acceptable explanation for the projected failure and the reply was the abolition of free tuition nationwide starting with the Northern Scholarship Scheme to make money immediately available for credit for private business to thrive.
To this official, the role of the government is to enrich businessmen who in turn will keep his party in power with handsome donations. He has convinced himself that the government has no duty beyond that; to make some rich and leave the rest to fend for themselves.
This reminded me of the Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman who famously suggested that airports and harbours should be privatised. Or the Junk Bond king, Ivan Boesky, who with a straight face and to wild cheers from the university graduates listening to him at a congregation at the Berkeley campus of the University of California, said ’’greed is the purest emotion.’’
Both Friedman and Boesky were all the fashion in useful economic ideas during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. If my memory serves me right, Boesky was convicted during the same period for his junk bond activities just as Michael Milken.
Rule of law
Right now in America, President Donald Trump and his rabid white supremacists have completely forgotten that it was the Republican President Lincoln who fought and won the civil war over slavery and the ideas on hateful display in Charlottesville, Virginia.
This is how far the party of Lincoln has deliberately, and with malicious aforethought, strayed from its founding principles.
The same ideological and political confusion pertains in Ghana in 2017. Where is the rule of law Ghanaians believed a government of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) will naturally offer to citizens?
In the midst of rampaging Invincible and Delta forces who proudly claim party membership, who today believe that the party of Danquah and Busia offer the rule of law?
What happened to the farcical judicial process in Kumasi? Where is the transparency in governance whose absence deprived the allegedly opaque National Democratic Congress of power last December?
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The tow tax and bond
We have so many situations in hand right now that more candidness and honesty from our own government will help us all understand and appreciate the direction it seeks to take us.
The statement to Parliament by the Finance Minister on the $2.25 billion bond was very unsatisfactory and confused more than enlightening. The tow tax levy has not been justified, and can never be justified.
It was pathetic listening to the owner of the beneficiary company on radio claim public servants offered him, unasked, this sweetheart deal.
The matter involving the forcible collapse of two banks in Ghana has provoked more questions than answers. How come these banks were winning banking awards as late as two years ago?
How could funds belonging to customers be appropriated by shareholders to run their private businesses without the knowledge of the supervising Bank of Ghana? This is pure, unadulterated financial incest.
I was even more horrified listening to a so-called expert say confidently that Parliament can have no role to play in this very serious matter. People such as these give education a bad name.
In all of this, the method may well be to privatise some government functions, for the sake of efficiency, though from my vantage, profit-making from privatisation may be more like it as the explanation for the confusion raging in the land.
There is a problem, however, to these unwarranted changes. They confirm for the thoughtful among us that true conservatives preserve and reform slowly, methodically and take the people along with them.
The socialist state that Margaret Thatcher sought to change only recorded a 17 per cent change in assets from the public to the private sector.
Reviving Nkrumah-era factories cannot be an answer to the election slogan of one-district, one-factory.
This is because they were run down or privatised by people who shared the ideas of our current government at the time, who honestly believed that an anti-Nkrumah posture will ensure international creditworthiness to balance our budgets, reduce deficits and tackle unemployment. All turned out to be mirages.
For the sake of the people of this country, I pray that this particular path of socio-economic instability which we put to rest with the dawn of the Fourth Republic in 1993, would be a thing of the past. We deserve no less. Greed is not the purest emotion.
