Please listen, all you my compatriots suffering in the motherland. You are teacher trainees with your allowances cancelled. Or you are teachers without pay and possibly, unemployed trained teachers. Yes, you are student nurses whose allowances have been slashed to a fraction; or nurses working without pay. I see teachers and nurses who have worked for years and paid only three months wages.
I have encountered teachers and nurses (even those with degrees) who have completed skill training but without job posting. You may never be posted under congress. Government pharmacists denied single spine; academics who are receiving a quarter of their single spine because of cedi depreciation against the dollar and always striking for a pittance of book and research allowance, hear me.
Pregnant women who no longer enjoy free medical care; indeed, the vulnerable in society, including kayayei, hear me. Parents, teachers and caregivers of children with disabilities, remember how often and for how long schools for such have closed for want of congress government support. Unemployed graduates you must be with me.
Farmers denied cocoa spraying and fishermen unable to afford outboard motor and premix fuel, you are part of us the suffering in the motherland. You also are if your health insurance card is not working.
Compatriots finding it difficult to, or cannot pay, a child’s school fees, you are motherland sufferers. There’s no free bus for your schooling child; she or he is not school-fed well; her or his school doesn’t receive capitation grant and regular supply of chalk; all that since January 7, 2009, you are as much suffering in the motherland.
Victims of dumsɔ, yesterday, today {and tomorrow with toaso), for example those of you with collapsed and damaged business, or made you lose your job or ever destroyed your cold stored food and medicines, you are suffering in the motherland. A Zongo resident without development fund, or Kayayei without hostel, or you worth only one dollar allowance increase, you are motherland sufferer. All you struggling to pay electricity and water bills and transportation fares are suffering compatriots.
To all you motherland sufferers, variously categories above, please join me to urge all JMs, JDMs, Johns, Opanas, Sharp shooters, whatever to plead ‘massa twaso.’ Si fam. Ours is to collectively thumb twaso (curtail) to suspend our hardship for the relief at the corner. Antics, lies, empty promises, pretensions, motherland sufferers see nothing in any of them that would mitigate their suffering. So they and we of the suffering motherland say twaso to give us a break. We need a break and a chance for Addo Drɔba to steer the motherland, with us compatriots in it, to prosperity.
The ‘people, revolution’ type, may be talking toaso. That would be talking toaso corruption, thievery and incompetence. Show me anyone talking that and I will show you how she or he was talking praise singing, and never talking relief, that anti-development ills must continue.
The motherland desperately needs a Nana Addo toa Kufuor adwuma so. It’s been eight lost years. But the way Kufuor moved from HIPC to middle income, with oil money (no matter how little is left of it after the congress plunder), Nana Addo will take the motherland from the lower middle income as at 2008 to upper middle income by 2020.
The economy is not back on track in our pockets. Only ampɛ brɛ congresseople are celebrating. Our economy shouldn’t have gone off track. It should never, never have gone off track given its sound strength in 2008. Thereafter, it was stealing galore; thieving every pesewa, including even that which ought not to have been thieved: disability school grant, capitation, NHIS contributions, etc.
For no capitation grant, school feeding, free bus ride and chalk, schoolchildren say twaso. In fact, children with disabilities whose schools have been intermittently closed say twaso. Babies, yet to be born, whom you have indebted to the tune of over three thousand American dollars each over the next 50 years say: ‘Bosea no ayɛ yie; adɔɔso dodo; enti twaso.’
Teacher trainees with no allowance and trained teachers without jobs say twaso. Nursing trainees with pittance allowance and trained nurses without jobs say twaso. Pregnant women present and the near future say twaso for killing their free health care. Educationists and health experts say twaso because you can’t go borrowing to raise empty concrete school blocks and hospitals with no money to put people in them. University teachers say twaso for reducing their salaries to their quarter worth. Abrɛ foɔ se, wo ne wo ampɛ brɛ foɔ mo nntwa so. Everyone says twaso ooo, twaso na yabrɛ dodo!
By Kwasi Ansu-Kyeremeh
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