The squalor, misery and deprivation in rural Ghana depresses me – Yvonne Nduom

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Created on Wednesday, 03 October 2012 00:00

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The squalor, misery and deprivation in rural Ghana depresses me – Yvonne Nduom

Seeing children in tattered clothes, clutching stools and brooms, and walking bare-footed to school on their first day in school is a depressing sight, wife of PPP flag-bearer, Paa Kwesi Nduom has said.

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Mrs Yvonne Nduom who speaking on Joy FM’s Super Morning Show Wednesday, said “this is not about politics, this is reality. When you see children – in the 21st Century - with ring worms, fungi infection; when you see people with jaundice…that breaks my heart.”

She said it was saddening that the quality of life in the urban areas formed the basis for the country’s political leaders to feel – rather fatuously – that the nation was making progress.

Proposing a simple test to find out whether the country was progressing or retrogressing, Mrs Nduom said, “I ask everybody to go to your villages, go to your own primary schools, look at what is going on there and then check for yourself; has your primary school improved since you left school”?

Providing anecdotal evidence to ground her argument, the soft-spoken but passionate advocate for a PPP earthquake in the 2012 elections, said, “When I was at Cape Coast University - at Adehye Hall – we slept one-to-a-room; we had lovely services; we had cleaners come to our rooms to clean; we had food; we had vouchers; I mean, it was fun; it was a delightful place to learn [in].”

“If somebody can go to Cape Coast University and come back and tell me that the dormitories are better, the [students] eat better," she maintained, "then we can say thank God, we are moving on, it’s progress but not when you go there and you have six people sleeping in a room,” she lamented.

Mrs Nduom said the nation’s politics had degenerated into a contest of mediocrity, ineptitude and petty personality attacks whilst the major issues of tackling poverty and diseases were left at large.

Consistently voting the two major political parties – the governing National Democratic Congress and opposition New Patriotic Party – she said, was not only dysfunctional but a tacit acquiescence to the retrogressive leadership they had provided the country with.

Making a case for her husband and the Progressive People’s Party to be given a chance in this year’s election, Mrs Nduom said the two parties will continue to treat Ghanaians scantily and regard the mandate of the people as a right, if there is no third force in Ghana’s politics.

Recounting the debilitating problems of the carnage on the roads, the killer Malaria disease and the garbage-strewn streets, Yvonne Nduom said the familiar refrain that the citizenry are to blame was a tenuous argument, asking, “Why did we elect people? Why were people appointed? Why were they appointed to be paid with the tax payers’ money? Was it so that we just put these people there and they will say ‘you the citizens, take care of the streets, clean the toilets, clean the gutters’, so when we were appointing people, what did we appoint them for”?

She insisted that people in leadership positions must be held accountable for their stewardship, for that is the only way significant progress can be made.

From: Malik Abass Daabu/Myjoyonline.com