Tuesday, 3 March 2015

THE EXTRA TIME MENTALITY






The reason why we are still lagging behind in the comity of nations is because our presidents both past and present have failed to prioritize every given opportunity in ensuring that its citizen's physiological and safety needs are met. They prefer to be lethargic in governance and waste their time on frivolities till the tail end of their administration before they begin to show seriousness. 

Extra time, an additional time needed or given to accomplish a task or project has become a phenomenon in our polity. It has taken over our system and now cuts across every facet of our lives.  

In football, it is a period of usually 30 minutes added to the end of the game if both teams have the same score. In extra time, the unexpected should be expected. Extra time could make or mar a team.  

In politics, anything can happen in extra time, it is in extra time that our government pretends to get serious with governance. At every given task, most Ghanaians especially in government prefer to handle such with levity till the dying minutes, when they run out of time, they put the blame on other people and after wards seek for extra time. There hardly seems to be a politician, institutions or profiteers of the government that are not guilty of extra time. The recent cancellation of the district assembly elections scheduled for March 3rd is a good example of an extra time phenomenon. 

After reassuring Ghanaians repeatedly of its readiness for the elections after several postponements, it took a supreme court to tell the Electoral Commission, it was working outside the laws of the soil, whence  directed same to stay and operate within the confines of the law because they are a creation of law themselves.
In explaining their reasons for the cancellation, Supreme Court panel, allotted all the blames at the door steps of the commission and reiterated its commitment for the polls and insisted the postponement was necessary and could not be circumvented.

How else does one explain such an unmitigated effrontery of our electoral commission                                                                                                                                                                                                     in the attempt to deny an aspirant? After 23 years in this same battle without much improvement, the Ghana electoral commission has in a release asked Ghanaians for an "extra time" of unnumbered weeks to be able to rout lay a new bill before our legislature and I am is forced to ask why the seriousness in this "extra time" and what magic do our electoral commission intend to perform in weeks unknown in dispelling those ragged tagged terrorists which they have not done in four years?

After failing to fulfill its core campaign promises and with less than a year to the general elections, the ruling government has suddenly realized they are in extra time and have started showing seriousness in all their unfinished projects all over the nation. How possible it will be for these unfinished projects to be completed in less before the December polls is what I am yet to know but in extra time, just as it is in football, anything can happen.
Before now, it has always been an easy ride by hook or by crook for the ruling government in the capture of the seat of power and for the first time in our democratic history, an opposition party is going neck in neck with the ruling party in the capture of the seat of power. Right now millions of dissenting Ghanaians are considering the opposition as an alternative government at the centre to fix the dumsor. 
Instead of asking themselves how they got entangled in this web by allowing the wind of change mantra catch up with them, the ruling party and its members have resorted to blame games, they have continued to blame the past rulers and opposition for the myriads of problems bedeviling our nation.
Just as it is done in football, after the normal regulation time without a winner, we have been caught in the web of extra time and, the most anticipated day of the year is the day this extra time will be played. It will be between the ruling party, National Democratic Congress, (NDC) and the main opposition party, New Patriotic Party, (NPP). 
Will the defending champions NDC be able to beat the rising opposition party, NPP and win the trophy back to back or will PPP or CPP the under dogs who many never believed will get to this final stage rise up to the occasion and beat both parties to the title?
December 7, 2016 will tell.

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