I was on JOY FM’s Ghana Connect programme yesterday; and the show looked at the non-existing culture of resignation in Ghana despite the hovering obvious incompetence, especially in our public sector.
An article I wrote a few weeks ago when the Madagascar’s Prime Minister and the Government resigned over their own version of ‘dumsor dumsor’ placed me as a contributing guest to the hour discussion.
Interestingly, a lot of important points were raised by everyone that was on the show—but I was pretty shocked when almost everyone on the show could not mention a public servant whose incompetence (be it over sight responsibility or not) is such gross that the person ought to resign or be sacked when they were asked.
Even if nobody at all merits this head cut, the Power Ministry has undeniably failed Ghanaians and someone ought to go for that. Earlier this week, Kuwaiti’s Water and Electricity Minister Abdulaziz AlIbrahim resigned—simply because the country experienced widespread power cut on February 11, 2015.
In my submission, I said; by default no one would resign even if that person is grossly incompetent but in other societies, people resign because of either a hovering tendency of being FIRED or excessive pressure from the masses.
In Ghana, we have wrongly aligned everything to politics and are unable to separate the daily political propaganda and hogwash from serious national issues or problems like the current power crisis.
When the power goes off; that of an NDC or NPP’s member does not stay on. What is fundamentally wrong is wrong, irrespective of where you sit on the spectrum—therefore, until we begin to eradicate the unnecessary ‘political biasness’ we attach to serious national issues, we wouldn’t be able to effectively hold any incompetent leader accountable. And we wouldn’t have any change.
Let me chip this, even if we go and bring UK’s David Cameroon to take over Ghana, he wouldn’t act any different from our leaders—in fact, he will do the same. Politicians all around the world are seemingly acting accordingly and in the interest of their nations because they are kept on their toes by the citizens and the press.
In Ghana, we lack these schemes of accountability; coming from the masses and the press. Until we begin to seriously take national issues serious and demand that those we put in charge are accountable to us, they will continue to take us for a ride no matter who we place in authority.