Flogging A Dead Horse - The Impunity of Valerie Sawyer

We have become a rather brave people. Well, brave or foolish, depending on which angle one decides to look at things from. And as I have said several times before, corruption is no disgrace in Ghana anymore. The more corrupt you are, the more influential you become in a society, where fiscal moral uprightness has been thrown to the dogs.


And so, the credible answer to allegations of corruption these days is not a denial of it, nor a resort to legal action to clear one’s name, but a counter reference to some other person’s corruption. In the end, we are all chopping and who cares.


And once “the horse is dead”, then it is hoped that sooner or later, people get bored of repeated allegations of corruption against a past government as the realities of their daily strife for survival kicks in and they naturally start to demand more of the current government. Millions of dollars would have gone down the drain, lodged comfortably in accounts round the world for the enjoyment of some few greedy individuals.


And so, where are the brave men of the NDC? Why are they not responding to President Rawlings? It is because of that same old reason that you know and I know. That their hands are steeped in the mud of the unprecedented stealing of public resources that took place in a government Valerie Sawyer was proud to be a part of.

That is why I would gladly listen to the booming or buzzing or whatever silly description this barely known deputy something in Mahama’s office chooses to describe President Rawlings speeches, rather than to people who bought and distributed V8 like confetti, took cars from Burkinabe contractors, engaged in unprecedented inflation of the cost of government projects and paid 51 million Ghana cedis to one man for no work.


I am happy not only for that dead horse to be flogged, but also for it to be butchered till we have retrieved every dollar stuck in its belly and if in four years in power, that is the only thing President Akuffo Addo does, he would have won my vote, for all its worth, in 2020.


Papa Appiah