The Sethoscope: Another vicious cycle of promises meant to be broken is coming in 2020

In April 2018, the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, Philip Alston, accused Ghanaian politicians of being champions of slogans but underdogs in implementation.

The Australian had come to Ghana to examine the government’s efforts to address poverty through the lens of international human rights law.

His verdict was not one that politicians particularly those in the government took with a smile.  It tickled some nerves. He was roasted so much that the ‘Kofi Broke man’ (roasted plantain) seller in my neighbourhood notorious for selling burnt plantains will be envious.

Hear him: “Ghanaian politicians are maybe world champions at creating memorable slogans that are good. [One District], one factory; [one village], one dam; [one constituency] one million dollars, et cetera.

“I see no reason to be that optimistic. There is a lot of data as to whether you can build one factory in each district, how much employment is going to be generated and the likelihood of all of these programmes being able to get off the ground and running in a short period of time is questionable,” he said.

Feeling burnt, the then Minister of Information, Dr Mustapha Hamid, loaded his canons and fired enough verbal missiles to keep the man quiet at least until after he left the shores of Ghana.

He described Mr Alston’s assessment as baseless and a “misunderstanding of the fundamental philosophy that has under-guarded the development agenda” of President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo.

“It is important to state that the report [by the UN Rapporteur] is basically a re-hash of the social problems that have bedevilled this country for generations like issues of streetism, the phenomenon of head porterage and the endemic poverty that characterises the three regions of the north and the coastal belts of Ghana especially.

It did not end there.

“Our $1 million per constituency seeks to put money that was hitherto applied to the development of the country whimsically and indiscriminately… directly into the constituencies allowing for better use of those resources,” the minister was reported as saying.

That was almost two years and the government had been in power for barely a year and four months. So it is allowed that the Information Minister at the time carries the cross of optimism. After all, for a race that is four years, halfway was still a long way.

However, President Nana Akufo-Addo is nearing the end of his fourth year as president, it’s time for an update — and a reality check.

There are lots of worms in the mango.

A closer look at the government’s implementation of the policies Alston mentioned shows shifting goalposts.

Admittedly, the free senior high school policy is one that deserves praise for keeping in school thousands of young people who will ordinarily have had their dreams buried like the NDC’s one-time NHIS premium promise.

However, nobody told Ghanaians when the NPP was making its packs of promises that the free senior high school policy will become one that the students will take turns to run on gold and green tracks in the classroom.

My niece, now a third-year student in one of the senior high schools in Ho in the Volta Region stunned me when she came back home in July 2019.

Throughout the term, they’ve treated just about four or five topics in Mathematics. For a system that promised more contact hours, I was alarmed.

Far from using this single episode as the litmus test for the progress of the policy, there are many frustrations parents are bearing.

In reality, the government’s popular acclaim that free SHS is putting money in the pockets of people may not be true a reflection of reality.

During the long vacation that has become the hallmark of the double-track system, parents had to kick the devil out of the idle lives of their wards by paying fees to enrol their children in vacation classes.

Away from the conundrum in the educational sector, when the NPP mooted the idea of One District, One Factory (1D1F) policy, it was praised as a panacea for the country’s post-harvest loses. But it is one policy that seen so much redefining that one will think it was an afterthought.

One need not be a clairvoyant to have told the government that looking into the future, it would have been impossible to build factories in every district in Ghana within four years.

With time as its debt, as far as the 1D1F is concerned, the government seems lost about the project. That is the impression I get from the Minister of Monitoring and Evaluation, Dr Anthony Akoto Osei.

At least, there is some honesty about a project that earned a lot of applause on rally grounds but struggling to live up to expectation like former President Mahama’s 200 community day schools promise.

Dr Akoto Osei was candid enough to say the government will not be able to deliver on its 1D1F policy before the end of its first term.

The NPP in its manifesto ahead of the 2016 general elections raised the hopes of Ghanaians with the flagship project as one its major interventions to drive the country’s industrialisation agenda.

“From what the Minister [Trades and Industry Ministry] said, I don’t believe that all 275 factories will be ready. Keep in mind that it is not the government that is producing the factories. It is the private sector and you cannot force them to produce the factories,” he was reported as saying.

Then the politician he is, he tried to justify the letdown by telling the electorates they had too high an expectation.

There are similar tales with making Accra the cleanest city in Africa promise. We are left confused as to whether the President meant riding the city of filth by 2020.

As for the cedi, the least said the better.

With political parties lacing their boots for this year’s campaign. Corruption will be topical. It will be a nasty cocktail of name-calling.

But there is one thing for sure in the corruption fight. The Akufo-Administration is a perfect mirror image of what we saw under the Mahama government.

Suddenly, some politicians who before 2017 owned tired salon cars and kept their windows down because of fuel cost could now afford SUVs and have their windows up with the engine running while out in a meeting. They returned to a chilled car and a waiting driver.

In all these, while the ordinary citizen nag about the despondency, an army of bootlickers and sycophants armed with mobile phone data have moved from serial calling to conquer the next frontier—social media.

In our faces, these elements from both sides of the political divide bicker and troll at our expense. Question government performance and those in the ruling party will skin you, criticise the lack of ideas from the opposition and you’re chewed.

In 2020, it is just going to be another vicious cycle of promises meant to be broken while we watch and cringe. In the end, some campaign promises will just be for rally ground applause.