President J.E.A. Mills may be the best Christian in the world but he certainly is also a bad leader, says the NPP�s Kwabena Sarpong. That, according to him is because the president does not appear to have a clue about what is going on around him.
Mr Sarpong said it was inconceivable that the good Christian that the president professes to be, he would give his appointees a carte blanche to abuse, debase and denigrate their political opponents with casual abandon.
Speaking on the Wednesday August 10 edition of Minority Caucus on MultiTV, the member of the New Patriotic Party Communications team, said the aloofness of president Mills had reached a crescendo as he watched while deputy Information Minister Mohammed Baba Jamal coached officials of the Information Services Department to lie to Ghanaians.
Baba Jamal told workers of the ISD that their duty ��is to make government look good, whatever the circumstance. If the government buys sheep and gives it as a gift, you are free to say it is a cow. You are free to say that. If the colour of the sheep is black, you can say it was a white colourful cow.,� He later clarified the statement, saying he was simply joking.
But Mr Sarpong has rejected that clarification, insisting the Deputy Information Minister meant every word he uttered.
To buttress his point, he quoted an unnamed report suggesting that the president commissioned 264 projects in three days � something he believes is simply not feasible. �That publication is proof that Baba Jamal meant every word that he said,� he added.
It was his contention that the comments of Baba Jamal were not unrelated to what he called the hijacking of GBC broadcasting by government spokespersons during the NDC�s just ended delegates� congress � it�s all a grand design to infiltrate all state institutions and control and manipulate information flow with the sole objective of misinforming the public for the political gain of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC).
He said while the government was entitled to, through the Ministry of Information and the ISD, disseminate its information to the general populace, what it was not entitled to, was to deliberately lie to, and deceive, the people.
Admirable audacity
Supporting his argument, co-panelist, Ms Ursula Owusu, said the audacity of the NDC was admirable.
Baba Jamal, in her opinion, must have had a lot of guts to tell Ghanaians in the face that the directives he issued to ISD workers in blatant disregard for the sanctity of his office, were just a joke.
�This attempt to downplay this incident is an affront to the intelligence of Ghanaians. To think that we will be gullible enough to believe what they are saying�you have to admire their audacity. They probably think that if they say it often enough and vociferously and loudly enough, people will believe it,� she stated.
She said unlike Baba Jamal�s suggestion that �Yours is to make government look good, whatever the circumstance,� the duty of the Information Ministry is �to present accurate information about what goes on in terms of government policies to the country � good or bad � if it is good, inform the people, if it is not so good inform the people so that collectively we can work to see how we can improve the delivery of governance to the people but if you tell them to lie, to embellish the truth, to twist facts to suit a predetermined agenda of painting the government in a positive light with an eye on the 2012 elections, what are we doing? How then can we trust any information put out by the government machinery�? she demanded.
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