Hello my dearly beloved Member of Parliament. It’s been almost a year since some of us saw you in our constituency. You would recall, the last we saw of you was when the parliamentary results were being declared at the constituency collation center. The polls went in your favor. Your friends, family and loved ones poured powder on you. They whisked you away in a waiting V8 amid pomp and pageantry. They prepared a very sumptuous feast for you that night. You ate to your fill. You drank yourself almost into senselessness. You made merry. I watched from the sidelines, couldn’t begrudge you. In fact, couldn’t help but be happy for you. I thought you deserved it. You worked very hard, or so I thought. Then you relocated to Ghana; I mean Accra.
On reaching Accra, you changed your telephone number and got ‘busy working for us’. We hardly heard from you. Not in the line of duty nor privately. The constituency chairman here tells that you have been in several committee meetings where the ‘actual parliamentary work’ is done. In fact, most of us are hardly able to make sense of all the grammar the retired teacher-cum constituency chairman speaks on such matters. So when we did not see your action on the floor of parliament, we assumed you must have been working anyway. The truth though, is that we are not sure what exactly you do in those committee meetings. We are pretty sure, nonetheless, that you have been busy. Very busy.

Darling MP, over the past 10 months, our constituency, like many parts of Ghana, has been through storm and high water. You and your ilk in the house have received several millions of our tax money in retrospective pay increases, from 2009, we are told? You have received new vehicle loans, rent loans, new garden-boy loans, new house-help loans, new cook loans, new gate-man loans, new secretary loans and many other loans. You were paid even when you refused to work in the first few weeks of your entry into the house. We bore all of those quietly, just to show how much love we have for you.

And while you were busily enjoying these pecks, we were being encouraged to believe that things will be turned around and we too shall have our share, as even the President was only in ‘first gear’. The very religious people that we have always been, we swallowed that one too; hook, line and sinker. Sad to say however, that the only thing which seemed to have seen an upward move has been hardship; yea, stark hardship. This too, we have been enduring since.

Then just the other day, out of nowhere, you and your colleagues managed to create some sense of self-importance and security alert for and about your good selves. All of a sudden, you are creating the impression as though you have all become some endangered species and so all of us should start running around like headless chickens to provide extra security for you??? Now I am choking on my own anger. Let me take a break…

I shall return.