Spio Blows Mills

Posted: Daily Guide |Saturday, 17 July 2010

By Charles Takyi-Boadu
The dismissal of Sekou Nkrumah as co-ordinator of the National Youth Council is generating a lot of heat in the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC), as key and influential members of the party keep criticizing the president’s decision.

Latest to join the fray is a Vice Chairman of the party, Dr Ekwow Spio-Garbrah, who thinks the president is virtually becoming a dictator than a modern-day democrat who believes in dissenting views.

Sekou had said that President Mills was not cut out for presidential office, suggesting that the former law lecturer was only fit for the classroom.

The statement caused panic in government, leading to Sekou’s dismissal on Thursday; three days after DAILY GUIDE published an interview granted to AfricaWatch magazine.

But Dr. Spio-Garbrah says that by sacking Sekou, President Mills would be carving a bad image for the NDC as a ‘vindictive government’ since “it gives some unfortunate impression that soon after somebody has made statements that seem critical of the president or the government, that the person’s appointment should be terminated.”

He believed if Sekou’s appointment was terminated based on the charges that had been preferred against him before he made the damning assessment on the president, it would have been easy to make the case that he was incompetent.

Dr. Spio-Garbrah wondered whether Sekou was the most incompetent appointee serving in the Mills administration, asking rhetorically “of all the people that have been appointed by the Mills administration, is Dr. Nkrumah the most incompetent; is the board applying some criteria to him which may not be applied to other institutions of the same government?”

Spio described some of the Mills appointees as ‘Team B’ and stressed the need for what he described as ‘some across the board approaches’ in such situations.

Meanwhile, there are several of such government appointees in acting positions whose appointments have not been confirmed by their respective boards, over a year after appointments.
It is therefore not clear whether they equally qualify to be branded as incompetent as Sekou.

Considering the fact that Sekou was sacked for supposedly being incompetent or better still unimpressive, as the Board of the National Youth Council (NYC), chaired by Esther Cobbah, puts it, Spio thinks that those who worked on the controversial STX Korean housing deal should also be axed, suggesting that they did not do the proper job which led to its withdrawal from Parliament.

“If you hear that STX has been withdrawn from Parliament and you are in London or New York, you feel sad because the president knows that when some of us were in cabinet, many of such projects that had question marks against them were halted right in the cabinet itself, they didn’t go to Parliament and the same proposal would be submitted over and over again by the respective minister until cabinet was satisfied that the document itself could stand the test of time outside cabinet,” he said.

Furthermore, he said, “if for whatever reasons, some cabinet ministers are not bold enough to express their views or if they feel that if their views are contrary to others they may get terminated, then you may get these kinds of situations.”

Spio noted that the timing of the termination of Sekou’s appointment created a bad impression about the government since it puts it in bad light and further deepened the perception that the Mills government was intolerant of dissenting views.

He was however not the least surprised at the decision to dismiss Sekou since it was a reflection of what several other outspoken members of the party, like himself, had had to endure, as they had either been hounded from office or faced some sort of persecution from members of the Mills administration for speaking their mind.

He noted that “if people were invited to comment on the government’s performance and after they comment they are either victimized, or in this case their appointments are terminated, it then gives a wrong impression on what the government is trying to do”.