Stories/allegations of government giving out freebies to influence the thinking, decisions and actions of influential people in the Ghanaian society have never been as rife before as currently being experienced under the Mahama-led National Democratic Congress government.
Reports/rumours of traditional leaders, members of the clergy, officials of the Electoral Commission, journalists, social commentators, politicians, among others, being given freebies like regular cash remittances, vehicles, sponsored foreign trips and houses have not ceased coming out since President Mahama assumed the highest seat of the land.
Tuesday’s allegation by the outgoing Moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of Ghana, Rt Rev Prof Emmanuel Martey, appears somewhat enough for discerning Ghanaians to believe that efforts are indeed being made to bribe people for them to speak and behave in certain ways in the country at the moment.
In fact, President Mahama and his functionaries will be living in the fool’s paradise to think that Ghanaians do not believe they doled out vehicles and a house to Akua Donkor to get her to speak and behave in a certain direction.
Ghanaians have not forgotten how critical the woman was in her comments about President Mahama and his government in the immediate days following the death of former President John Evans Atta Mills. What could have influenced her current posture other than a dole-out of freebies from President Mahama?
We at the Daily Statesman are inclined to believe that a corrupt government like the Mahama-led NDC administration that sees governance as the best means to create the opportunity for family members and friends to milk the nation will have no difficulty at all using the resources of the people to influence them to go the direction it wants.
Having failed to deliver satisfactorily on the mandate the people entrusted into their hands in the 2012 elections, and with clear electoral defeat staring them in the face, indications are that President John Mahama and his functionaries will go all out using the resources of the state in a desperate manner to perpetuate their ill-administration.
What Ghanaians need to understand is that it is this kind of reckless and obvious criminal use of funds from the national coffers that has combined with the gross economic mismanagement and sheer ineptitude of the Mahama government to plunge the nation to the current state of total despondency.
Nothing is working in the country for the good of the masses. And it is therefore expected that influential people in the country, including our traditional leaders, members of the clergy and journalists, will act and speak in ways that show they are with the masses in the untold hardship foisted on them.
With the critical positions such people occupy in the scheme of affairs of the country, they need to see it as a divine obligation to provide a critical voice for the masses other than doing the bidding of those who are engaged in obvious criminal mismanagement of the resources of the country.
While applauding those who have resolved to stand on the side of the truth, we want to draw the attention of the rest, who may want to be compromised to follow certain directions, to the fact that they eventually become stupid in the eyes of their ‘benefactors’ it they allow their own resources to be used to ‘buy’ them.