Ex-President John Dramani Mahama is slowly and craftily plotting a new agenda to ‘create, loot and share’ Ghana’s scarce financial resources even further. In times past, similar schemes he set up ended up being whole-scale losses.
Mr. Mahama is hiding his new agenda behind an alleged initiative to create jobs for Ghana’s long-suffering deceived youth and millions who are unemployed.
At least two initiatives he has announced in recent times would in all likelihood end up like the guinea fowls that flew to Burkina Faso and never returned in a scam that cost the nations tens of millions of Ghana Cedis.
Two of the plans that are in the works to create an avenue to put millions of dollars into the pockets of his undeserving friends and cronies, is the deception that he would provide electric motorbikes for Okada riders, and to set up micro-poultry farms for unemployed.
Both ventures are likely to leave Ghana at the worse end of hundreds of millions of cedis in debt. And John Mahama would not be the one to pick the bill. It would be the taxpayer.
That is if Ghanaians are misguided enough to grant him another chance at the Presidency.
During a recent engagement with Okada riders, Mr. Mahama said that he has been talking to various companies to manufacture electric motorbikes and sell them to Okada (commercial motorbike) riders on a hire-purchase basis. What he did not add is that government would have to underwrite the whole scheme in a possible public-private partnership scheme. Similar efforts in the past by various government agencies have met with dismal failure, and the latest hare-brained scheme is likely to meet the same fate.
A similar idea Mr. Mahama has put forward, is that he will set up small poultry start-ups for those who are interested, where he would give out the chickens, the coops, the feed and other support mechanisms. Like the idea about motorbikes, this scheme is also likely to be highly expensive, and highly unlikely to succeed.
What it is most likely to do, is end up shoveling large sums of state cash into the pockets of favoured individuals.
Ghana has had a long and painful history with similar schemes in the past.
When Mr. Mahama was president before, he set up a scheme that reputedly cost Ghana over GHC38,000,000.00 (thirty-eight million Ghana Cedis) to produce guinea fowls for the public. The scheme lost the money, but not a single bird was ever produced.
Mr. Mahama has never acknowledged the dismal failure, nor apologized for same. Yet he is back promising more.
