The National Security of this country has been entrusted into the hands of a boy by name Larry Gbevlo Lartey. A boy in mind and at heart though he is advanced in age.
That is the only reason he would be senseless enough to personally issue threats at the editor of this paper. Someone should tell that boy to do his worst. Death is the ultimate. It is an inevitable end. Beyond that there is nothing he can do. He should abduct us (as he did to our editor on March 16, 2011), torture us, detain us, kill us and burry us in mass graves. After that he should live forever or perhaps grow and metamorphose into a hard rock.
Many at times, we make the mistake of thinking that any male child who crosses his teen years automatically becomes a man. Nothing can be further from the truth. Being a man is not about age, neither is it about muscles. It is about having brains that work, a mature attitude and having a sense of responsibility.
That Gbevlo boy, instead of focusing on his job and respecting the authority that appointed him, wastes his time on petty trivialities and hops from one radio station to another talking like a parrot that has eaten too much pepper.
Which National Security Coordinator who has the brains of a man would go on radio to debate and trade near-insults with top guns at the Presidency? Which National Security Coordinator who has the brains of a man would enter into a fight over who becomes or who does not become a District Chief Executive? Of course, only a boy would behave that way because boys have no sense of loyalty. They easily grow wings and get drunk with the little (temporal) power put in their care.
Instead of finding solutions to the security concerns of this country, that Gbevlo boy, would spend his time monitoring and doing a near-espionage on journalists and editors who he thinks are critical of him.
He is yet to appreciate that the two idiots trailing workers of this newspaper are simply on a wild goose chase. It is either they spend their time celebrating laziness and go to him with bogus information, or they simply see him as someone whose instructions are not worth following.
That is the only reason they would (mis) inform him that someone in this office meets with a certain top military officer for information. When we heard it, we laughed and popped open a bottle of (none alcoholic) champagne because we got delighted the dudes are reading from an old dusty diary.
What amazed us the most was the fact that the journalists he is sponsoring with the tax payer’s sweat at Dzorowulu seems to be more current with information than the two lazy idiots who think they are trailing journalists. If Gbevlo had asked his journalists, they would have told him that we now have eyes and ears in his own office.
Just when we were wondering whether or not the Gbevlo guy would ever grow into a man, we heard him on radio justifying the senseless attack on Gifty Lawson, a female photo-journalist who was lawfully going about her duties.
The poor lady was taking photographs of a suspect on the compound of a court, outside the court room when Gbevlo’s boys grabbed her, assaulted her, put their filthy hands into her panties in public, abducted her and shoved her into their vehicle, dumped her at the headquarters of the Bureau of National Investigations (BNI) and released her hours later with no charges and no apologies.
Yet Gbevlo sees absolutely nothing wrong with this? That is the attitude of a boy. Boys never accept mistakes. They never take responsibility. They have an allergy for the three magical words “I am sorry.” They use their muscles to bully girls. They act with their hearts rather than their heads.
It is only a boy who would live in a glass house yet have the guts to throw stones. A boy would have dry raffia stuck in his pants yet would jump over fire. Instead of investigating how his own signature got forged in his own office and used to cash huge sums of money, the Gbevlo boy is running round chasing after lizards and hurling stones at them. Our only regret is that he is paid with our taxes.
It is still a mystery why the President exercised a voluntary blindness to the several mature minds that wanted the job and gave it to this boy.
The hens have come home to roost and Gbevlo has proven that when you give your pearls to swine, they trample on it.

Source :Daybreak 

The Appointment Of E.T. Mensah As An Overseer Is An Error Of Judgement

I author this piece in the interest of the education of all Ghanaian children and in the national interest. I am disappointed and disillusioned and so are many observers and sympathizers of our great National Democratic Congress (NDC) about events in the last few days leading to the appointment of Mr. E.T. Mensah to lead the political discourse on education as its overseer.

I consider this appointment as a complete error of judgment on the part of the president and those who offered him this advice. It is unfortunate that at a time when the general Ghanaian populace is dissatisfied with the outcomes of our educational engagements from the foundation level through the tertiary level, we will have the impudence to now begin to rub salt in their wounds by appointing a clueless and incompetent individual like Mr. E.T. Mensah to lead the national discourse on education. Let me be blank to say that Mr. E.T. Mensah should not even for a split of a second lead Ghana’s educational discourse for there is nothing he would bring to bear on that all-important discourse.

If, indeed, at its current state, the NDC lacks individuals with the requisite skills, the competence, and the hands-on experience to lead the national discourse on education, I am sure nothing prevents the president from extending a hand to an academician who can fill the void until such a time when a substantive card bearing member of the party is found to lead the educational discourse. After all, the logic on which we elected Professor John Evans Atta-Mills was because of his academic credentials. If that logic still holds, to the extent that some of us believe that a teacher who doesn’t understand simultaneous equation cannot teach it, then we expect the learned professor to respect Ghanaians and ensure Ghanaians get value for money. “How on earth can you appoint Mr. E.T. Mensah to head the vacant education ministry when we have stalwarts like Dr. Ekwow Spio-Garbrah on the sidelines watching the unfolding events?” a caller who woke me up this morning to the story quizzed.

I do not want to belabor why E.T. Mensah’s appointment to the education ministry will only add to the undying crisis that has engulfed the NDC administration. I urge the president to return immediately to the drawing board to rectify this obvious blunder before it is too late. Ghana doesn’t lack the needed human resource to turn its fortunes around. It is the lack of vision, courage, and the dynamism to ensure we have the right mix of skills and competency in its political leadership to take bold decisions that will inure to the benefit of the whole nation that is causing us to still be wandering in the woods without a destination.

Once again, I reiterate the point that Mr. Enoch Tei Mensah does not have what it takes to lead Ghana’s educational discourse. There are thousands of Ghanaian professors who have excelled in the area of education and can bring their knowledge and expertise to bear on the educational system. Let’s, for once, be sincere to Ghanaians.

Prosper Yao Tsikata

NDC Member and Activist.

By Solomon Mensah

When night falls and the “Abayees” are snoring heavily like Okonkwo does in his sleep, brisk businesses are born on pavements of Accra. The items sold range from consumable to non-consumable goods. Brassieres, foot wears, jewels, and “kye-bom” with bread are but a few wares that compete with pedestrians on the pavements and spill over onto the streets of Mayor Okoe Vanderpuije’s Millennium City.

Clinking of bells, soothing voices calling on passersby to buy, sign languages and many more constitute traders’ advertisement. As someone born and bred in the woodlands of the Brong Ahafo Region, I get curious when I walk in the streets of the capital. In my part of the world, the sun does not set on traders. Back at Dodosuo (my holy village), one has to knock on Maame Kwaayie’s door when it is 6pm for condiments. And if it becomes your habit to be knocking on traders’ doors after sunset, you can easily be (mis)taken for a witch. But that seems to sharply contradict the marke ting trend in big cities. “Their market knows no night,” I mummer to myself . It is 8:10pm and I am walking down the lane leading from the V.I.P Bus Terminal at Kwame Nkrumah Circle towards the Ghana Commercial Bank tower. Men, women and children are seen busily buying and selling. I am so trapped in the crowd that I have to walk sideways like a man who has lost his bearing to alcohol. A young woman in her late twenties has the neck buried in the clothing she sells. Her right leg is mounted on a small post and one hand dipped into the pocket in an attempt to ‘balance’ a customer. Next to her is another fairly old woman selling a pile of second-hand clothes.

Asare Emmanuel sells ladies’ bags. He tells me this lane is the Circle Odorna Market. On a blue polythene rubber spread on the pavement, his stuffed bags sit like bull frogs in a swamp. “Oh the night market here is good. I make good sales each night”, Asare explains why he sells at night.

But aside this flourishing venture at night, the question as to whether it is good selling on pavements is what must be the concern of authorities of the city, if not the sellers and buyers.

Asare’s friend, Kwabena says the Abayees (AMA city guards) do not allow them sell on pavements. He corrects my impression of the Abayees sleeping heartily at night. For him, the Abayees only sleep with an eye closed.

“They come here sometimes around 11:30pm after us,” he screams into my voice recorder and makes a passionate appeal. “Please, tell them we beg them.” Business seems to be thriving in the night markets, especially as the economic rains of the single ‘swine’ sorry ‘spine’ keeps falling. But this act of indiscipline must not be allowed to continue for long. Pavements are meant for pedestrians’ passage but not for market. Simple! The night markets on the pavements have also become safe havens for pick-pockets. They mingle with the crowd and take advantage of the human traffic to terrorise unsuspecting passersby.

The most annoying attitude of traders on the pavement is the fact that they see it as their right to do what they do. In one of my rush hours to catch Burma Camp bus at Tema station for lectures, I got humiliated by a trader. My crime was my unknowingly kicking a pair of shoe he displayed on a pavement. The least attempt to rid our cities and towns of such acts of lawlessness is often met with the accusation of rendering people jobless. But the fact that there are no jobs does not mean that we should compound the situation with behaviours that have the tendency of making life uncomfortable for people in our towns and cities. We must all help the Accra Metropolitan Assembly (AMA) to make our city clean and safe.

The writer is a student-journalist at the Ghana Institute of Journalism. Email: [email protected]