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Warmest greetings, Abusuapanin. I hope the recent New Year gift from the president in the form of increment in petroleum products has not put your budget out of gear. I�m only hoping you are coping with the harsh economic situation in the country because hope is all we have. As you may already be aware, hope is that feeling of expectation of improvement in one�s present situation. Hope, no doubt, is very good. Hope is good because it reduces stress and gives us the positive feeling that the future is brighter than the present. Hope also heightens our dreams and aspirations. Even though we most often fail to attain these dreams and aspirations, we continue to cling on to hope because it gives us that beautiful feeling of buoyancy. A dying man, they say, will clutch at any straw. He clutches at any straw hoping for survival. Any straw he touches gives him hope and spurs him on to fight for survival. As such, when Candidate Agya Ofuntuo was drowning in 2008 following his defeats at the 2000 and 2004 polls, he did not hesitate to clutch at straws. He needed hope to survive so he made all manner of promises to me and my compatriots. He knew most of the promises were unachievable but he made them anyway. My compatriots and I needed hope as well so swallowed the bait hook, line and sinker and voted him into power. Not only did we give him hope, but also made his dream come to pass. We made him president of this beautiful country. We made him president because we believed in the hope he promised us. We had hope in his promise to put cowries in our pockets, reduce fuel and utility prices drastically, catch the murderers of Ya Na Yakubu Andani II and also give us paradise on earth. But all turned out to be a mirage. In the action year, we were promised the STX housing project but there was no show. Gang of six� roads- no show; Volta University- no show; Brong Ahafo University- no show; Kotokuraba Market- no show; Cape Coast Sports Stadium- no show. Massa, the list is endless. So I ask; when are we going to see an iota of show so we can have a flicker of hope? In his New Year address to Asomdwekromanians, the president entreated us to be hopeful because there was light at the end of the tunnel. Ironically, his actions pointed to the contrary as he promised us hope in 2012. He did not even hesitate to increase our hardship by increasing prices of petroleum products. Yet he looked us in the eye and promised us hope. Perhaps he thinks we are morons There is no doubt the hope the president is promising us is itself hopeless. Indeed, my compatriots and I could only believe in his hopeless hope if we had our skulls not tightly screwed to our heads. But since the reverse is the case, I wonder how we can ever be hopeful and believe in his kind of hope. �Yensa aka sika no oo, yensa aka� is now the song on the lips of the president and his greedy bastards. Unlike the boy in the MTN advert who asked where the money was, I would rather join them to shout hurray! Massa, the $3bn loan is big oo! Wait a minute! We should not be too carried away by how huge the loan is. Whisperings in my ears say the country generated the same amount when it exported 1 million metric tonnes of cocoa last year. I�m also reliably informed that the country received $7bn in loans alone between 2009 and 2011. If the Agya Ofuntuo government couldn�t judiciously manage these huge funds and others not mentioned here, what is the guarantee that the much-talked-about $3bn Chinese loan would be any different? For a man who has on countless occasions given my compatriots hope, only to turn it into a nightmare, another promise of hope from him could be nothing but hopelessness itself. From where I stand, I see no hope. Even if there is any, it is at best a hopeless hope. There is no better evidence of the hopelessness of the president�s hopeless hope than the testimony of the man who picked him from obscurity and brought him into the political limelight. The man says his prot�g� cannot offer Asomdwekromanians any hope because of the �chop-chop� syndrome. Remember no one can claim to love the eagle-headed Umbrella more than this man because he was the one who endorsed the Zu-za constitution with his own blood. Of course, there are those who would disagree with my stance. I know the greedy bastards would vehemently disagree. They would say 2012 is a year of hope because it affords them another opportunity to milk this country dry. They would shout their voices hoarse that it is a year of hope for the average man in the street because prospects are bright for them to once again �woyomize� the country. I would however entreat my compatriots to still cling on to hope; but not the kind Agya Ofuntuo is offering. My compatriots should cling on to hope because we shall have the opportunity on December 7 to right the mistake we made in 2008. They should resist any form of oppression from the greedy bastards and make sure their voices are heard; for the president and his cohort have once again shown that they are only good at dancing the dance of an infant masquerade, and not the dance of a matured one.