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| Letter From The President: Scapegoat Bartels |
9/30/2005 |
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Letter From The President: Scapegoat Bartels
Countrymen and women, loyalists and opponents has any of you tried to call the Minister for PSD and PSI lately? Well, don’t even bother calling him because he is out of coverage area. He is not on a national assignment is some far off village, though. He is with me right here in Accra. He has chosen to stay out of coverage area because he’s licking his wounds after he was forced tell the whole nation that he doesn’t often mean what he says and that he hardly says what he means.
Over the past couple of months I have been thinking about how to boost food production in Sikaman. So during one of our cabinet meetings I suggested that perhaps we should introduce another Presidential Special Initiative under which politicians will be granted cash and free land to farm. It had been done very successfully in undemocratic Cote d’Ivoire under the tyrannical rule of Hophouet Boigny. But I knew right from the onset that it was a silly idea that will not go down well with the majority of our people. In a country where MPs do not pay back their car loans, it would be very difficult (if not impossible) to convince our people that there is wisdom in donating free lands to MPs for farming. So I just asked the ministers to ‘chew’ on it and come up with suggestions on how best we could modify the idea to fit into the Sikaman situation. A few weeks later, I traveled to New York for the UN summit.
I was in the Big Apple when I heard that my PSI minister had announced that we are going to implement a policy of donating lands and cash to encourage MPs and other politicians to go into farming. Unsurprisingly, most people got mad and, as usual, they used the radio stations to insult me. My government was accused of being too “chop-chop”. Even whiles I was wining and dining with other world leaders across the Atlantic, I could feel the insults and the piercing criticisms.
When I returned I called Bartels and asked him to defend why he chose to open his mouth too wide to say something I have not asked him to make public. He couldn’t. I also asked him to find a nice way of polishing up his hasty announcement to change the impression he had created that our government was only interested in “chop-chop”. Once again, he couldn’t. He told me that amidst all the confusion, he had temporarily lost his ability to think. He said he was confused. He asked that I give him two weeks to come up with some ideas. I couldn’t wait for two weeks, so I ordered him to go and withdraw what he said. And that’s how come he issued that terse “for the avoidance of doubt” statement. I have heard some of you say that by retracting his statement, Bartels has shown humility. I don’t think so. In fact, it will interest you to know that he didn’t want to retract it until I forcefully ordered him to do so. If he was humble enough to do the retraction without duress, he would have been on air by now proclaiming his modesty.
I am glad I made a scapegoat out of him. I have been looking for an opportunity to tell ministers of state that I don’t like the way they open their mouths too wide to say things they don’t need to say and make promises – always speaking about government’s intention to do this or that “soon”. This has gone on for much too long – so much so that most Sikaman citizens don’t take “soon” seriously anymore. When they hear a minister say something will be done “soon”, they just shrug their shoulders and resign themselves to the fact that “soon” might mean five more years.
Sometimes, ministers and other government officials pass off their utopian dreams and hallucinations as government policy. That also annoys me. I am the only person who is allowed to pass off his dreams as policy. But ministers with bloated egos have for so long been doing what I am the only person with the power and privilege to do. What annoys me most is when they ‘steal’ my ideas and announce them publicly as if they were their own – like Bartels did. I can bet my last cedi that if I had told the nation that we were thinking of offering incentives to encourage politicians to go into farming, people would not have been annoyed as they were when it came out of Bartels’ mouth. I would have intelligently polished it a little bit more to give me an escape route. Instead of just announcing that the policy was just for the benefit of politicians, I would have said that even though we are targeting people in politics, we would also like to engage anyone who shows an interest in farming. If Bartels had said this, my government wouldn’t have received the flack it did and he wouldn’t have been forced to eat his words.
The whole episode also raises issues about government information management, doesn’t it? When Bartels was making the announcement, the Information Minister was sitting right there. I watched the TV footage of the conference and I saw Botwe nodding his head like an overfed lizard as Bartels made the infamous proclamation. That tells me that at that particular point, he had no problems with Bartels opening his mouth too wide. It was only after the so-called policy had attracted public criticism that Botwe came out to say that “it was the wrong use of language” that made Bartels say what he said. If this was the case why didn’t he say so right there at the press conference? I am so disappointed in Botwe that I am thinking of removing him from the Information Ministry. He used to be a hands-on person and very dependable. Not anymore. Being called “honourable” at every turn has spoilt him. I am seriously looking for a new information minister. As soon as I get one, I will remove Botwe and send him to some other ministry – probably agric or women and children affairs. I am even thinking of taking up the information portfolio myself so that I can be able to censor what ministers say before they even get near a microphone.
Excellently yours,
J. A. Fukuor
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