In the Bible, there is a parable about a master who gave coins to his servants when he was traveling and upon arrival, he asked for accounts of the money from the servants. Succinctly, the one who received 5 doubled it, the one who received 3 did same and the one who received 1 said he dug and hid it in the ground. The angry master rebuked the lazy servant.
This parable in the Bible is the contemporary situation of what is happening in the baby Ministry, Creative Arts which is ‘siamesed’ with Ministry of Tourism. In the previous budget, the Ministry was allocated GHc 2 million. As to what the Ministry did with the money, there were blame games that, the money miraculously found its way into the hands of MUSIGA headed by Bice Osei kuffour aka Obour. Other branches of Creative Arts were nagging and asking for a fair share of the allocation but that did not yield any result.
The potbellied president, Obour when asked what the money was used for gladly said the money was used for the Ghana Music Week Celebration and research. The team traveled to Argentina to embark on research into music which would be implemented in Ghana to beef up the growing industry soon.
Every discerning Ghanaian knows that, President Mahama currently is not a happy man considering the way everything is falling apart in his administration. He (Prez. Mahama) has emphatically stated that, there is no money in the country so for a Ministry to be making such frivolous remarks, what would poke the government to make provisions for them in another budget?
In the 2015 budget, even the Savanna Accelerated Development Authority (SADA) programme which was a major campaign message for the NDC was not captured how much more ……
GHc 2 million used for research and Ghana Music Week Celebration? Obour is now a Sound Engineer, one of the selfish benefits of the Argentina trip. And you expect a President who is demonstrated against every month to budget for such people again? Obour probably needs to do more explanation because what he accounted for is not convincing enough!
The limited resources should be channeled elsewhere. I strongly agree with this decision, “until you become serious, nobody would take you seriously.”
I shall return!
Author: Nana Kwesi Coomson (www.233times.net) @nkcoomson on Twitter