Former Chief of Defense Staff (CDS) Brig. Gen. Joseph Nunoo Mensah has warned that the sword of Damocles is looming over Ghana, a country whose governance under President Akufo Addo is fast deteriorating in corruption, mismanagement and insecurity.
In an interview with Accra-based 3FM, the old soldier who is known for his plain-talking pointed to the streets as the wailing evidence that an uprising against the ruling class is only a small trigger away.
“We are sitting on a huge time bomb. It is as if we are a nation of mad brainless people. We have so many mad people on the street yet we are buying land cruisers. We have so many unemployed youths unemployed on the streets, yet we do not care,” he said.
He laments that “so many children on the streets are a danger. People are begging for alms on the streets. Ordinary people don’t have a place to lay their heads, all these are dangers and signs of hard days ahead of us”.
According to the former CDS who resigned over the killing of three judges and a retired Military officer during the heady days of the AFRC junta, the uprising “could happen because the situation is bad. Children are dying. People are going to Libya and dying on the road. The world is desperate now and can’t go on like this”.
Ghana’s economy is in dire straits with many people warning that the Akufo-Addo government’s multiple failures in various fronts of statecraft could lead to the country plunging into a mess.
Food inflation, unemployment, heavy taxation and the continuous depreciation of the local currency against major trading currencies have meant that the poor in the country are barely subsisting.
Amidst it all, the Akufo-Addo government has been piling the national debt with garrulous borrowing with the Finance Minister, Ken Ofori-Atta, contracting his private company, Databank Financial Services as a so-called bond market specialist that earns a staggering commission for the Finance Minister personally, anytime Ghana goes to the bond market to borrow money.
But amidst the austerities, government corruption has often dominated headlines.
Brig. Gen. Nunoo Mensah laments that in spite of the taxes that the government collects, it is unable to build schools for the country when he, as an individual, does just that.
“If I, a single man, could build a school for this nation, how come an entire state or government cannot do that?” The old soldier adds for good measure, “we are a Christian and loving nation, we should not be stealing when we get to the top. I swear, if we don’t change, it [uprising] will happen if we keep thinking like this. Now it’s a matter of life and death,” the retired army officer warned.