J.H. Mensah: Why I can`t quit politics
Loading ...Veteran politician Joseph Henry Mensah, one time senior minister and long time politician says he intends to remain in politics and like a soldier, die with his boots on.
In a brief interaction with Joy FM’s Israel Laryea at Kasoa in the Central Region where the New Patriotic Party on Sunday held a mammoth rally to outdoor its flag-bearer for the 2008 elections, J.H. Mensah laughed off the question of whether he intends to pull out of politics.
“Pulling out? You know I’m a farmer and a fisherman, we don’t pull out. We die with our boots on.”
“You want me to go and sit in the bush and do what?”
Asked if he intends to retire from politics, J.H. retorted, “What is the Ashanti word for retire?” He insisted the word has no equivalent and indeed does not exist in any Ghanaian language. “There is none in any Ghanaian language.”
The Chairman of the National development Planning Commission maintained that he would be around to give not only as much as he can, but also how much the party or country demands of him, but “retire from politics? We are born to serve, that’s what we were all born to do, and we were educated to serve, we were trained to serve and we will continue s-e-r-v-i-n-g.”
Asked if for him it is a case of once a politician, always a politician, J.H. said rather it is a case of “once a servant, always a servant.”
J.H. Mensah is a politician of immense exposure and experience, at one time in charge of economic planning in the Kwame Nkrumah-led CPP administration.
J.H. Mensah was Finance Minister (Commissioner) in the National Liberation Council military junta. He was Minister of Finance and Economic Planning in Kofi Abrefa Busia’s government. In the first term of incumbent President John Agyekum Kufour’s government he was Senior Minister of Government Business and head of Economic Management before becoming chair of the National Development Planning Commission in the second term. J H Mensah was a member of the African Advisory Council of the African Development Bank (1993- 1997).
Kofi Akosah-Sarpong writes of J.H. Mensah as being “In the history of Ghana’s development planning”, “an eclectic man; a technocrat who has swam through the rough-and-tumble of Ghana’s national development making. Perhaps his deep-seated nationalism emanates from such a broad background.”
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