An Atta-Mills University of Brong-Ahafo?

On a presidential campaign tour of the Brong-Ahafo Region recently, the Ghana News Agency (GNA) quoted Prof. John Evans Atta-Mills as promising the chief and people of Sunyani, the Brong-Ahafo capital, that if voted into power, the so-called National Democratic Congress (NDC) would establish an Energy and Renewable Resource University in the region (Ghanaweb.com 3/7/08).

Ordinarily, such promise would have been all the more appropriate, for the Brong-Ahafo Region has the enviable distinction of having produced the first Ghanaian, and African, to be named Professor at the University of Ghana, our nation's flagship academy.

Needless to say, the taste of the proverbial pudding lies in its eating; in sum, there is absolutely no pudding, vis-à-vis the political history of the Provisional National Democratic Congress (P/NDC) to give credence to Prof. Atta-Mills' promise.

Indeed, for the two decades that the P/NDC maintained a hermetic stranglehold on Ghanaian politics, not a single viable higher educational institution was established. To be certain, it was the anti-intellectual regime of the P/NDC that saw to the dramatic regression in general Ghanaian academic standards. Thus, it is unpardonably insolent for the P/NDC flagbearer to be staking such a blatantly outrageous claim, one that could never be fulfilled were the longsuffering Ghanaian electorate to offer Prof. Atta-Mills a mandate of ten electoral terms, or forty years.

To-date, about the only institution of higher learning that the P/NDC can legitimately lay claim to having established is the so-called University of Development Studies (UDS), whose curricular strength is about anything but development studies. Somebody has even suggested that the latter institution be renamed the University of Underdevelopment Studies (UUS), considering the grim fact of the UDS barely materially answering to the legitimate designation of a university college. To be certain, not only is the UDS a practically poor excuse for a bona fide institution of its kind, it is also the most under-funded and least enviable of all the major academies of Ghana, including all the privately-owned institutions of higher learning. Indeed, legend has it that the UDS was funded by the P/NDC on the piddling sum of $ 50,000 (Fifty-Thousand US Dollars), far, far less than the reported sum of kickbacks received from the Scandinavian Cement Company (SCANCEM) by Messrs. P. V. Obeng, Rawlings and the Rawlings Corporation, otherwise known as the Provisional National Democratic Congress (P/NDC).

Thus, it is quite interesting for Prof. Atta-Mills to be promising the establishment of an Energy and Renewable Resource University in Brong-Ahafo. For starters, it is not even clear whether, indeed, Prof. Atta-Mills even has a lay person's appreciation for what an Energy and Renewable Resource University does, let alone be able to follow up on his campaign promise. If the P/NDC flagbearer did, indeed, appreciate half of what he is promising, Ghana would not have been plunged into the sort of apocalyptic energy crisis and wanton public resource wastage that characterized most of the two decades that the P/NDC held Ghanaians by their proverbial scruff.

And as was to be expected, the entrenched and perennial presidential candidate of the P/NDC also took a cheap swipe at the school-feeding program initiated by President J. A. Kufuor's New Patriotic Party (NPP). According to the Ghana News Agency, “Prof. [Atta-] Mills said [that] providing food for the children alone would not make education achieve the desired result[s].” Had the Rawlings second-banana consulted with his chief patron, the former University of Ghana Law School lecturer would have learned to his utter shame and embarrassment the following terse military credo: “A soldier walks on his stomach.”

In any case, while one is unreservedly inclined to concur with Prof. Atta-Mills that, indeed, “providing food for the children alone would not make education achieve the desired result[s],” it would have even been more instructive for the P/NDC presidential candidate to have explained to his audience precisely in what manner, form and shape P/NDC record on Ghanaian education compares favorably with that of the Kufuor-led New Patriotic Party.

Prof. Atta-Mills also had the chutzpah to lecture the chief and people of Sunyani about “the reason why teachers would not only be motivated through adequate remuneration, restoration of study leave with allowance to them[,] but also the improvement of other areas that would make teachers to [sic] expand their [professional] knowledge” (Ghanaweb.com 3/7/08).

Had he been honest or adequately prepared to level with the Ghanaian electorate, Prof. Atta-Mills would also have remembered to add the fact that the chronically unsavory culture of withholding the salaries of Ghanaian teachers for months on end was uniquely refined into a deft and punitive political art by the government of the so-called Provisional National Democratic Congress (P/NDC) – (see Okoampa-Ahoofe's Sounds of Sirens: Essays in African Politics and Culture).

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English and Journalism at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. E-mail: [email protected].