I have not resigned – Nana Oye Lithur
The Minister of Gender, Children, and Social Protection, Nana Oye Lithur, has vehemently denied rumours that she has resigned from the government.
The rumours, which started in the middle of last week, have been quietly but quickly spreading because of her loud and bombastic silence on the attacks against female celebrities who criticised her government.
Nary a word of condemnation has escaped from the lips of the once-upon-a-time vocal advocate of women’s rights, after Halidu Haruna, James Agyenim Boateng, Dela Coffie, Kweku Appiah, aka Appiah Stadium, among others, referred to women who asked the president to solve the country’s power crisis as ‘inhabitants of brothels.’
Nana Oye’s denial was contained in a statement the minister issued to congratulate Ghanaian mothers as they celebrated Mothers’ Day over the weekend. The statement described the rumours as ‘bewildering, farcical, obnoxious, and vexatious,’ and turned the guns on journalists, lambasting them for ‘failing to give publicity to my response to these attacks on Lydia Forson and Yvonne Nelson.’
Our correspondents reached the minister to find out how it was possible that she had condemned the attacks but nobody has yet heard her do so, and asked her where and when she made those statements.
Her reply was that ‘I’ve been condemning the attacks, but I do it at home. And as journalists, it is your responsibility to sniff out information. So why didn’t you people find out what I’ve been doing and report on it?’ After a short pause, she added, ‘After all, what is the purpose of those hefty ‘soli’ sums of monies we dished out to you, if not to manufacture good stories for us in instances where we cannot ourselves materially create those stories?’
She then promised Ghanaian women that since the government cannot really control its communicators, she was working on a list of less offensive insults for party spokespersons who want to attack women.
‘For example,’ she said, smiling at our reporter, ‘it would have been more acceptable if Halidu Haruna had told Yvonne Nelson that the performance of the president in government is far better than her performance in her movies.’ She said this training is likely to take time, but assured the country that by the end of the year, Ghanaians will notice a significant improvement in the decency of NDC communicators.
Editor’s note: The ‘Inside the News by Mpakoo’ column, which appears every Monday exclusively on ghanabusinessnews.com is satire.