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The road to failure is paved with excuses. As I listened to the President of the Republic, John Dramani Mahama speak at the Institute of Economic Affairs, I was stung by the real meaning of hypocrisy, affectation, deceit, falseness and sanctimony. They were all exhibited by President John Dramani Mahama. President Mahama and his NDC cohorts do not have any positive ideas that will move this country forward, none. President Mahama dwelled mostly on the Fourth Republican Constitution as his guide for running this nation. That is good if he means well. What he fails to note is that nobody takes a government to court for doing what is good for the nation when the constitution does not explicitly say so. The NDC and its presidential candidate have become so obsessed with Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo�s vision of ensuring that every child in this country is offered the opportunity to have a secondary education such that wherever they are, they rubbish it and create the impression that it is not achievable. He could be pardoned when he moves around rural communities to tell that to the very people whose children need the Nana Addo vision the most, but not at a forum like the one offered by the Institute of Economic Affairs. Just watch two adverts on the TV, the NDC goes to either Chorkor or James Town to pick adults, who by all intents and purposes, did not have the benefit of secondary education and who should be interested that their grandchildren become the beneficiaries of this dream policy, to oppose it. Yes, mediocres survive when everybody around them is kept ignorant. Again, they have organised some young school children who do not know how their parents pay their school fees to also oppose the free SHS which comes on stream in the last quarter of 2013, very sad. At the IEA organised forum, Mahama tried to justify his abhorrence for free SHS by using the constitution of the country. First, he says that the constitution of Ghana requires that within 10 years, basic education must be made compulsory and universally free, and that once that has not been done a free SHS is not a possibility. Just as he is calling on Nana Addo to sack his advisors on something he said about free child healthcare, John Mahama needs to reshuffle his advisory team as well. In the first place is it not an indictment on the NDC which he leads today if after 20 years of the fourth Republican democratic rule, this nation has not been able to implement the FCUBE programme he quoted from the constitution? Yes, this is because the NDC has had 12 out of the 20 years of constitutional rule since the nation disentangled itself from the clutches of dictatorship of the PNDC, out of which the modern NDC democrats were born. The constitution says a particular action should be undertaken within a certain time frame. That has not been done. Somebody says that an action which virtually has no deadline in implementation will be done early enough to solve a social problem, the President of this country says no. I just can�t believe this. It is more nauseating when many of those opposed to the policy themselves were beneficiaries of a similar policy in the past which has made it possible for them to rise to the heights they have achieved today and the positive contributions they are making towards the development of this nation. Why would they want to keep others down when they climbed to the top through the same route? Why, is it out of selfishness or shear wickedness? While it is true that it is important to implement and enforce the Free Compulsory Universal Basic Education programme, it is also very important to note that when a child�s education terminates at the JHS level, the door to higher education is closed to that child forever. Today, the minimum requirement for any post SHS institution in this country is passes in WASSCE; Universities, Polytechnics, Colleges of Education, Nursing Training Colleges, you name them. Aside the educational ladder, the minimum entry requirement into the Ghana Police Service, Armed Forces, National Fire Service, Ghana Immigration Service and all other public institutions require a minimum of WASSCE before admission can be considered. Any child who misses out on this basic requirement, no matter what potential nature has bequeathed to that child, cannot be enrolled in any of the above state institutions. Yes, primary or basic education as defined today is important but meaningless to the child unless it is linked to an SHS education which further paves the way for future academic progression for the individual. Another amazing argument from President Mahama and the NDC in their warped understanding of the policy is their belief that since the constitution states that SHS should be made progressively free, any attempt to instantly make the SHS free is a violation of the constitution. By joke, the President does not even know that the word progressive itself is subjective. At what progressive point will the poor children of Ghana enjoy free SHS? If the President really believes in the Constitution, then he has to be told that his decision to select 200 Ghanaians from the same geographical area for training in Cuba is a blatant discrimination against the majority of us in the southern part of Ghana; an act which offends the Constitution. His reasons for choosing people for training only from the northern sector of the country are bunkum and baloney, to use his own words. If the NDC has developed a policy which uses our collective resources to train a particular group of people to the exclusion of others because those areas lack the requisite human resource, we should be told. This nation trains all her children irrespective of where they come from and post them across the length and breadth of this country irrespective of where one hails from. If other professionals are not comfortable working in particular areas, it is because the basic necessities of life are not available in those areas. There is no guarantee that those who were discriminately selected by President Mahama would go back and work in the northern part of this country simply because they hail from there. The only thing that will make them want to stay back home and work there would be the provision of basic social facilities that will not only enhance their individual personal lives but also the services they are expected to render to their kiths and kin, period. At the moment, are there not more educated northerners working down south than those working up north? What period of your post-graduate life did you devote to your people up north? President Mahama, is that the same reason why out of the 100 Ghanaians studying in Aberdeen in the United Kingdom, 90 of them come from your area? It is incumbent on you to tell Ghanaians that the GNPC has an educational fund of $3million for manpower training in the oil sector. How many people from the Western Region are studying at Aberdeen out of the 100? You have, ever since you became the Vice President and subsequently the President of this country, discriminated against those of us from the south. You are opposed to free SHS for those of us from the south while it is still being implemented in the north, you decided to pick only people from the northern part of the country for the Cuban programme with such distorted reasoning which is vomitory and discourteous to the rest of us in this country and spend the GNPC educational fund also in blatant discrimination in favour of people from the northern part of this country. This is too bad and very much divisive for this country. You came to the Western Region to tell the people about your government looking for funds to build mini-hydros on the Pra, Ankobra and the Tano Rivers? Honesty has given way to dishonesty, and it is difficult even to trust those you previously trusted. I personally travelled long distances both on the Ankobra and Tano Rivers to locate the exact sites for the three mini-hydros with the late Kwadwo Baah Wiredu when he was the Minister for Finance. The funding for the projects had been secured then, but the NPP lost power and therefore could not implement them and rather diverted the money to construct road from the Volta Region to the Northern Region. What is President Mahama saying to the people of the Western Region? Insulting our intelligence again? Still in the Western Region, you are complaining about galamsey operators destroying cocoa farms? Since when did that come to your notice? Your new found Chinese friends have gone riot and are behaving foolishly like bulls gone berserk in Chinese shops, destroying everything that come their way throughout the country, and you pretend you are unaware? Please, just give me two tots of as usual to stabilize my conditions. I will be back.