Many people have come to see Dr. Mensa Otabil as an educator extraordinaire and an influential force of reason in our country. He preaches with an exceptional sense of originality and his ability to eke life-changing messages out of the most mundane biblical verses is yet to be matched by any other preacher I know of.  I mean he talks sense with originality.

Do you remember the SADA boss under whose watch the guinea fowls they produced were said to have disappeared? Is it Gilbert Iddi?  Yes, don’t be surprised when you see him mount the podium at the next National Awards ceremony to receive the Order of the Volta for the disappearance of those guinea fowls.  

This is how he used the guinea fowls to earn himself the award which is meant to reward him for his stellar contribution to conflict prevention in Ghana. After the SADA guys produced the guinea fowls, they remembered how one guinea fowl sparked a tribal war in the north some years ago. Their conflict prevention antenna went up. They reasoned that if one guinea fowl living alone could spark a tribal war, then a platoon of guinea fowls living together could orchestrate a coup d’etat that could destabilize the country. They also thought that a coup d’etat in Burkina Faso would be better than one in Ghana so they encouraged the guinea fowls to fly across the border in order to preserve our peace. Now that you know that the guinea fowls disappeared for good reason, I guess you will leave the SADA guys alone.

Dr. Mensa Otabil may just be that lone proverbial guinea fowl, which at its meek best, could still spark a war in the NDC? Tell me. Who doesn’t know in Ghana that we need a new leadership response to the country’s problems? I am not saying the pastor is flawless, no. I for instance felt strongly that he erred in his response to the NDC’s use of his voice clip in 2012 and I found his language on that occasion to have left a lot to be desired. I therefore published an article entitled “Dr. Mensa Otabil and His Living Word” in November 2012 on various electronic media platforms in which I publicly drew his attention to his mistakes. However, in this particular case where he called for a new leadership response to the country’s problems, he could not have been more spot on. 

Otabil just repeated the obvious and it was one of the few times that he actually made a statement which did not require any special wisdom to make. That we need a new leadership response is known to my twelve-year old nephew who barely scrapped through his JHS1 third term exams and has only been listed as a probationary JHS2 student for the incoming academic year. If my nephew who is struggling to make sense out of lessons on Tetteh Quarshie and Komfo Anokye, even knows that Ghana needs a new leadership response, why do the government communicators want to make the statement appear as if it was a Dr. Mensa Otabil copyright?

If he was just stating the obvious, then his critics could say he was just being populist, more so when he did not make any concrete suggestions as to the type and form this proposed new leadership response should take.

Yes the pastor did not proffer any solutions because it would be unwise for him to do so publicly. I will tell you why. The Ghana Cedi for instance continued to depreciate daily against international trading currencies not because the economic circumstances that triggered the depreciation were getting worse daily. The speculative behaviors triggered by the total loss of confidence in the government’s ability to solve the problem overtook the root causes to become the biggest driver of the free fall of our currency.  

If I was wise enough to make the list of the elite club of the V8 zooming advisors of the president, what I would suggest would be for the president to invite the renowned pastor to the Flagstaff House to discuss the specific recommendations he may have about what the new response should be. If the pastor has any real and practical recommendations, he will share it with the government. If he was just making a populist empty noise, it will also show, in which case the so called government communicators may have a legitimate basis to take him on.

The tried and tested short term response to such crisis is to fire and hire. This gives a strong first signal that something is being done about the situation. But the pastor cannot publicly tell the president to fire the holders of portfolio A, B and C if he believes this is what will win back the confidence of the people. He can also not publicly tell the president to bring Martin Amidu back as Attorney General. He does not need to explain in front of the cameras how no other action by the presidency can buy the amount of goodwill that restoring Martin Amidu to his former position will immediately do for the government.  But will the president have the balls to do it? His people with tainted hands would chew him up even if his own hands are clean.

All the reshuffles that have taken place so far appear to be cosmetic with the possible exception of the late realization to get Spio to better piss from within. So long as confidence in the system remains low, people will continue to speculate under the cheer-leadership of Dr. Bawumia who has been at his doom mongering best over the last few months.

If I had the chance to get anywhere close to Dr. Bawumia, I would whisper into his ears that wherever the exchange rate reaches before he comes to power, he cannot bring it down. It is therefore not in his interest for things to get out of hand before he comes. If his party wins the 2016 elections, we will like to see him hit the ground running to fulfil their electoral promises. We the same people who are hailing him today will not accept extended periods of excuses. It will thus be in our collective interest for him to change his doom mongering strategy which only contributes to making things worse. He should in the name of Allah stop adding turbo chargers to the speculative engine of our economic woes.

The president, on his part, has a choice to make between buying the goodwill of the people for himself or selling it to his successor. He can choose to buy himself the goodwill by firing those who need to be fired now, not tomorrow. He can also choose to keep them to perpetuate the low confidence syndrome until he himself gets fired by the people in 2016 for the goodwill to automatically pass on to his successor. The choice is his. He should therefore tell his communicators in no uncertain terms to leave Dr. Mensa Otabil alone! Unlike the SADA guinea fowls, the pastor will not fly over to Burkina Faso today or tomorrow!