President Akufo-Addo and the Tragedy of Governance: “I shall Protect the Public Purse!” – Part 1

Folks, you will recall that when he was being inaugurated into office, Akufo-Addo made a profound declaration: “I shall protect the public purse”, implying that he would curb wanton expenditure of public funds and shore up Ghana’s coffers with the view to propping up the economy. What has happened under his watch belies that wanton declaration of intent or claim. Why it is so isn’t difficult to know.

A cursory assessment of happenings under his watch confirms that he hasn’t redeemed that pledge yet nor is there any indication that he will do so before leaving office. Here are a few persuasive instances to confirm that Akufo-Addo’s tongue-in-cheek declaration of intent is nothing but a play on Ghanaians’ intelligence, an insult to morality and an affront to decency in public office holding:

a. his creation of needless Ministries and organizations as employment avenues for NPP-oriented youths; packing the seat of government with countless Presidential Staffers with no productive agenda to grow the economy; and unrestrained travels in the country, packing fuel-consuming V8 SUVs in his retinue/entourage.

b. his profligacy in terms of unrestrained foreign travels (mostly on chartered flights); excessive recourse to floating bonds and not accounting for the outcome; abandoning development projects begun by his predecessors only to begin constructing similar ones; the needless carving up of some regions for political expediency; inability to manage the economy; and many more.

There is no indication that the trend will change by the time Akufo-Addo leaves office. I have identified just some of the worrying aspects of happenings under Akufo-Addo for purposes of what I intend to do in this write-up. In fact, I don’t intend to focus my lens on the positive or negative aspects of the excesses but I have cited them to support my rhetorical agenda.

What, then, do I intend to do? I want to do a linguistic analysis of Akufo-Addo’s declaration (“I shall protect the public purse”), focusing on the major functional linguistic item “shall”, to tease out its implications and argue why we are seeing how Akufo-Addo has been doing things. To the uninformed, Akufo-Addo’s conduct runs counter to that declaration, but there is more to it. That is what I intend to explore and expose for the good of public discourse on Ghana’s woes.

… To be continued…

By Dr Michael Jarvis Bokor