Joy News presenter Manasseh Azure Awuni has written on the endless praise and adulation the NDC are handing themselves after completion of the new interchange at the Kwame Nkrumah Circle – and his conclusion is a simple one – “any idiot can borrow money and build projects”.
Manasseh argues in a piece tackling the issue that borrowing money to build such projects is not something to pat oneself on the back about, considering that nearly anyone can do that. What takes guts and initiative, he argued, is generating funds to carry out such projects so that a burden does not fall on the coming generations.
Manasseh started by attempting to explain that the phrase ‘any idiot can’ is not desultory, simply meaning something that requires no special nous but which every Tom, Dick and Harry can do. He cited a former use of the phrase by Johnson Asiedu Nketia from the days of the 2012 election petition, when he said ‘any idiot can go to court’ – he argued that much as is was not an insult then his use is not an insult now.
He continues…

Any idiot can borrow money and build schools. Any idiot can borrow money and build hospitals. Any idiot can borrow money and build an interchange. What an idiot might not be able to do is to buy a drone for Felix Kwakye Ofosu to take aerial shots of the projects and flood social media with them. That’s the innovation here. Building infrastructure would have been an extraordinary achievement if the government had used innovative ways to raise funds on its own to build them.
Here is a common sense explanation of what is happening. Some of the loans will be repaid by our children and grandchildren. So it is like your grandfather borrowing money in your name to build a house, for which you will pay, and then your grandfather wants you to call him the best in the world. Because you need the house, you may praise him for the initiative, but there’s nothing extraordinary about it. Governance is a much more serious business than borrowing money to build.

He attacked the Community Day Senior High Schools which the President seems to be infatuated with, arguing that what the country, what the youth really needs – are jobs.

President Mahama is infatuated with building community day senior high schools. Common sense ought to tell anybody associated with those projects that the communities in which those schools are built cannot produce a quarter of the students needed to fill them, except those in the city. Pupils in those communities also aspire for the top senior high schools in the country so it is only those who fail to get admission and those who would choose the day schools as their first choice will enroll there. Students from nearby and far away communities would need accommodation to be able to attend the community day schools because there are no commuter vehicles in many of those communities. And it is not wise to rent rooms in communities for teenagers as young as 12 years to stay on their own and go to senior high school. So it is not a wise idea to build DAY senior high schools in the 21st century.
Infrastructure is important, but the youth need jobs. In 2006, youth unemployment became a national security threat to Ghana so the National Security Council advised the government to initiate the National Youth Employment Programme, which later became known as GYEEDA. Between 2009 and 2012, when this government managed GYEEDA, nearly ONE BILLION CEDIS was pumped into GYEEDA. Unfortunately, however, about 80% of that money was stolen by ministers, government officials and their accomplices in the private sector.
Infrastructure is good, but if the achievements of a government were all about borrowing money and building schools, hospitals and road, then my illiterate father could do well as a president. All he needs to do would be to surround himself with family and friends and get an expert to advise him on the purchase of a drone so that the projects can be captured and splashed in the Green Book and on billboards and in a special propaganda edition of Ovation Magazine.

You can read the full piece on myjoyonline…