COMMENT: Kwesi Pratt Is A Danger To Ghana�s Democracy

As a kid growing up in Ghana, Kwesi Pratt Jnr and Malik Kweku Baako were my heroes and I use to stop everything I was doing to watch them on the then �Talking Points� program on GTV. The two of them at the time made a lot of sense in almost every subject matter. I will never forget the day Kwesi Pratt was on GTV with his minutes from a cabinet meeting during the Kufuor-led administration. He was so full of his facts about oil pricing on the world market that one had no option but to agree with him even if you hated him. Kweku Baako also at the time even earned the nick name Mr. Documents because he went everywhere with his supporting documents. I remember sitting all day at �Always Around� in Unity Hall of KNUST just so I can have a good seat when Kweku Baako showed up. It is however sad that as I got older, I soon realized how empty headed these guys really are perhaps because they only specialized in �anti-Rawlingsnism�. They knew everything there was to know about Rawlings and so will spend the rest of their lives criticizing him without running out of material. I am not saying this because I care for former President Rawlings. The truth is, I have never liked his politics and will never like it but I do think his absence from the scene, took away all the materials these guys had and their lack of understanding for the issues of today especially Kwesi Pratt who I must say is getting worse by the day due to his hatred for, not just the two former presidents, but also anything from the western world. I came to this conclusion on Kwesi Pratt after listening to him make arguments on Peace fm on a variety of issues. The conclusion I am gradually coming to is that Kwesi Pratt is a racist socialist who is only out for himself and frankly do not care about the good people of Ghana. One point that makes this vividly clear to me is his recent rant on the comment of the British High Commissioner to Ghana. He called the British rude, arrogant and all sorts of names simply because this man was bold enough to speak his mind on the business friendliness of Ghana at an academic event that he was invited to deliver a speech on that topic. The question I had after listening to Kwesi Pratt was how will he have reacted if the same things the High Commissioner said had been said by a black man from say Togo? The reason why this bothered me was that, the statement was made in an academic setting where the students were supposed to learn something from it but as far as Kwesi was concerned, it shouldn�t have been said eventhough the statement reflected the true state of Ghanaian affairs. Mr. Pratt is also on record to have said that �Elections were useless if the World Bank and the IMF dictated to us�. He went further to say in Twi that every vote a Ghanaian casts, he/she is casting it for the two agencies. This statement I think is unfortunate and frankly Kwesi should be made to apologize for denigrating the importance of the Ghanaian election system. What this man doesn�t understand is that there are a lot of people in Ghana who haven�t yet understood that he is full of crap and are going to take his word for it and curtail their participation in our democratic struggles and the real question then will be what will Kwesi do? Somebody needs to tell Kwesi that those institutions that he, so callously, uses his populist propaganda against are banks funded by the taxpayers of the countries or the people he hates. If he can walk into any bank and take any loan without guarantees of how he is going to pay for it (Conditionalities) then he should go ahead and do that. The institutions are not charitable organizations and if history is of any relevance to Kwesi, he will understand that our leaders have proved to the world that they are not capable of managing our affairs. They will prefer to send people like Kwesi to South Africa to watch soccer draws on tv and 200 others to Angola to watch a match for free which he Kwesi praised rather than give those people jobs so they can afford their own tickets to anywhere they want to go. These were all done from the taxpayers� coffers and which country is going to sit by and watch their money being spent that way while they struggle themselves? What is amazing though is the fact that this man never shuts up. He seems to have something to say about anything and everything. He however never offers any suggestion or takes leadership in anything except to be in the front line of a demonstration. I might have missed it but would Kwesi be kind to tell Ghanaians what his contributions has been to mother Ghana over the years? His suggestion for the biometric passport brouhaha is ask more questions? Mr. Pratt please tell us what your ideas are! You are probably already wondering how all of the above criticisms of Mr. Pratt make him a danger to the Ghanaian democracy. It is easy, if he is not challenged in time, it is not going to be long before he takes the whole nation down his freeloading attitude thereby producing more people with questions rather than answers. This in my opinion is not good for our democracy and it was this type of situation that led to the 1979 so-called revolution where human beings celebrated at the death of other human beings. The disaffection that was sown by Kwesi Pratt and his ilk led to the constant justification of the mayhem that took place and brought us Former President Rawlings that we are still struggling to contain. My suggestion to Kwesi Pratt is that, he should stop being part of the problem and start being part of the solution. He has been criticizing people for over 30 years but he has never taken up any public service himself to serve the people he loves so much. Please give it a shot for it is very easy to criticize others when you never have to be in their shoes. Until this is done, I think Ghanaian media should stop given him a platform to spew his hatred. I hope he takes this criticism in good faith just as he expects others to take his seriously. God Bless Ghana!