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Tuesday, 10 December 2013

Ghana, One Year after Elections

It's been a little over a year since elections. Remember whoever you voted for? Do you still think you made the right choice? This country has lots of issues and I doubt any of the candidates could fix it but at least, if we had voted for Hassan Ayariga, we would probably be laughing so much our woes would be a bit tolerable.


Or we could have voted for the CPP, at least we would have gotten a chicken each. I was really curious how this was going to work but I guess I will never find out.

Productivity in the first six months was reduced drastically thanks to unreliable power supply and what was in my opinion a very needless election petition. Most people do not agree with me that the petition was needless. The prevailing argument being, the petition strengthen our democracy. No it did not. I never for even a second thought that the court would over turn the election results. Not because I thought the election was fair (I'm not saying it wasn't) but because it was just impractical. In Africa, after every major election, the losing party quickly refutes the results they nag and nag and results are maintained. This petition was a grand waste of time and money.

While this exercise in faultily was going on, the rest of the country was literally burning. Market fires everywhere. Not a week went by I which we didn't hear of one market or the other burning. As usual, someone these fires we politicized. The theory was that, political enemies of the ruling government were the pyromaniacs behind these fires. The president even went to get some 'Special Investigators' from America to come help investigate these fires. Till this date, we've not heard the findings of these investigations.

Anyone with an iota of sense would have realized that these fire were cause by a combination of the sporadic power outages and the power electrical wiring in the said market. Seven months of load shedding and market fires and just when the load shedding was over, the fires ended. Of cause, they would have us believe it was a coincidence.

After seven months of not getting the electricity we were so dearly paying for, long suffering Ghanaians were rewarded with a 78% increase in tariff, 2.5% increase in VAT, numerous increases in fuel prices and a general increase in prices of commodities. Then came the strikes, Doctors, Teachers, Nurses, Lawyers, Pharmacist and even at one time, taxi drivers.

It went up even further, now, fan yoghurt is GhC1.00 ðŸ˜­ðŸ˜­ðŸ˜­ðŸ˜­

Granted, the president couldn't be blamed for all these problems but at a point in time, it didn't look like he was in control of the country. The ministers were on various platform making one ridiculous statement after another. Ministers were contradicting each other and it just felt like the country was a kindergarten class without the teacher.

Then a few weeks ago the president announced that he and his member of parliament were taking a 10% pay cut. This was seen as a good sign by some and others felt it was to score political points the rest of us were just indifferent. Then a few days ago, one minister grandly said workers should follow their example and everyone should take a pay cut. Pause...

It hasn't been all gloom but the rays of sunshine have been far between. What do you remember about the year under review?



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