Cocktail Of Confusion

A group of NDC supporters are demanding the ouster of the National Security Coordinator. Their choreographed protest, with some of them referring to him as a Warrant Officer, suggests that those picketing do not even understand what National Security entails or anything about the man whose head they want under the guillotine. The retired lieutenant colonel who understood what was unfolding, especially its origins, virtually screamed out that a certain rich and powerful person in the ruling party is behind it all. The mission of the man, he said, is bound to fail because nobody, he boasted, can remove him from office. The suggestion is that even as he coordinates national security matters, he is being sabotaged by his adversaries within the ruling party to which he belongs. No wonder Fulani herdsmen are able to do whatever they want including raping married women, because national security management is not in the best of shapes. His response also speaks about how the various power centres are engaged in a mad scramble for the spoils of elections in a country where the winner-takes-all system is a norm. In the face of all this, the president is constantly scared of the countrywide �thank you� tour of his political benefactor�s spouse and its fallouts. The vote of no confidence passed on him by a section of the party upon which he came to power is a debilitating phenomenon. A deputy minister with oversight responsibility over the police orders the arrest of eight policemen for allegedly insulting him. He himself had earlier raised the political temperature when he dished a litany of insults to a number of persons including a whole region. The foregone are but some of the challenges the president is beset with. For him however, silence is the word as he remains glued to the Castle. If his silence is intended to be a strategic move, he has got it all wrong because his critics have analysed his see no evil, speak no evil and hear no evil approach to matters about the state. His cynics think that these developments show that he is only a figurehead with no power to take decisions, leaving such responsibilities to powerful men sharing the corridors of power with him. That is what Ghana has become under the prevalent political dispensation. If the foregone do not connote confusion in the country, we do not know what else do. We would prefer to describe the prevailing developments in the country as a cocktail of confusion. They are symptomatic of bad governance unleashed upon the country by the president and his team. We have often asked why the president rarely speaks about some of these issues as they incessantly pop up on our political plane. The Kobby Acheampong debacle, for instance, is one which demands his intervention of sorts, especially since it hinges upon the morale of police personnel, the integrity of his government. In spite of the decency in a presidential intervention through the cracking of the whip on the deputy minister, for instance, President Mills will hardly do such a thing. Punishing defaulting appointees is not one of his attributes and he would not do that now, especially since the man at the centre of it all is a foul-mouthed personality whose modus operandi, he (the president) appears to be in love with.