For a while, it appeared the motherland had nowhere to go but keep sinking post-December 7, 2016. Profligately constructed billboards, costly enough to drill a number of boreholes to provide potable water or chalk to schools for years, seemed to be pointing at a motherland going nowhere.
Our motherland is saddled with debt contracted to build schools of concrete without students and money to fund the schooling.
She is further burdened with two expensively constructed factories that produce no jobs because they are not yet ready to produce goods.
The motherland and her daughters and sons, my compatriots, sure needed some hope for change.
It had been infrastructure big talk with little to show as if infrastructure should be a stand-alone strategy; an end in itself instead of means to an end of work and happiness. Only in the motherland would anyone person or group of people boast of good at producing hopelessness. Suddenly has come a Sunday of hope and optimism. As well, it’s been a day of redeemable promises. The manifesto says that compatriots need not stay jobless forever. It says there are alternative ways for creating abundant jobs. One district, one factory sounds like re-enactment of Kwame Nkrumah’s Seven Year development Plan at the end of which we were going to recruit manual labour from neighbouring motherlands.
Job-seeking compatriots in the motherland don’t have to stay jobless. To the most vulnerable in the motherland, I count the teeming motherland youth, some with what are obviously ready-to-employ skills. The latter can hatch on to a redeemable promise of some kind of good times in the future. The young can now clearly see a future while the old and infirm can hope for life of quality.
Gullible compatriots might have, in despair seen a Third Reich type crowd psychology at play at a Sunyani gathering. Sunday, that was overshadowed by an Old Polo Grounds 1957 celebration of independence by jubilant people type re-enacted at the Trade Fair Site. It was pure quality information on display in quality presentation and not some inanimate billboard trickery.
Sector by sector, relief for us suffering compatriots was spelt out in clear policy and plan of action. If you want to know what you can expect post-January 7, 2017, check out the rotten incompetence of today and look back to the prosperity as at January 6, 2009. If you heard one emboldened woman spell out re-awakening the Kwame Nkrumah dream of savanna belt as food basket, you should be assured you and all our compatriots would not starve. My Stool has had to spend a fortune, choosing between an elder’s life and constructing a CHPS Compound. Huge, really massive funds, meant for building a CHPS Compound have gone into partly defraying an elder’s medical bills. Ironically, this is someone who volunteered his new house he has never lived in so we could establish the CHPS Compound. Accordingly, my compatriots, if there is a plan to breathe some competence into the management of the NHIS that is hope and optimism.
The wives look like they could more competently handle ministries better than the kids who came in to use time they were being paid to build the nation to go to school. There is nothing about the future first wife which would suggest her raising a warehouse at Jubilee House to store goods purchased with public money for private distribution, as has happened with a house of flagstaff.
Also, nothing suggests a second wife will be so ignorant to present computers to a school without electricity only to turn round to scold a school head who asks for ordinary chalk.
The way she analysed publicity waste of stolen public funds, she looks far smarter and knowledgeable to act like computer without chalk.
This one, I mean the redenomination thing, I am not talking some. The economy construction whiz kid says a competent lawmaker would have presented the views he had formed through reading and other means to state how expensive redenomination was in 2007. If he didn’t, he didn’t do well enough so he cannot peddle falsehood for the sake of an election in 2016. Better not talk what you haven’t read, the economist says. I say Hmmmm.
My compatriots of the motherland have heard the loudmouthed who idly talk Kwame Nkrumah and do waste. Sunday, we saw those who talk not but want to do Kwame Nkrumah. Between talkers and doers, I will go for doers anytime, anyday. I hope the overwhelming majority of my compatriots would too. Should that materialise, it would be all hope and optimism. And one should be able to count on the return, in the minimum of 2008, if not the maximum of the 1960s and 1970s, of an abundance of that hope and optimism.
By Kwasi Ansu-Kyeremeh
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