The event was the commissioning of the New Lavender Hill faecal treatment plant by Mr Mahama.
Even
though proceedings were scheduled to commence at 8:00am according to
invitations sent out by the Corporate Communications Team of Zoomlion
Company Limited, managers of the faecal treatment plant, the president
and his entourage of ministers arrived at the venue at about 12 noon.
Members
of the diplomatic corps, notable amongst them the Head of the European
Union Delegation to Ghana, William Hanna, Ambassador of the Kingdom of
the Netherlands, Ron Strikker, and Australia High Commissioner, Andrew
Barnes, had arrived for the event before 8:00 am, thinking the programme
would start on time so they could attend to other things for the day.
But, that was not meant to be as the president who was the main man for the day was nowhere to be
found for close to four hours.
The
diplomats were visibly frustrated and were seen glancing at their
watches every second and complaining amongst themselves about the delay
of proceedings.
At a point, they woke up
apparently to leave when a certain lady, perhaps one of the organisers
for the event, approached them with the aim of trying to calm them down.
The
MC for the event, Jerry Adjorlolo, had on several occasions told the
gathering that the president and his entourage would soon arrive, asking
some guests to relocate their cars to create space for the president.
Exit
Ambassador
Hanna was forced to leave the event 12: 10pm, 10 minutes after the
arrival of the president, the ministers of Youths and Sports, Local
Government and Rural Development, Collins Dauda and Nii Laryea
Vanderpuye as well as the Mayor of Accra, Alfred Okoe Vanderpujie.
No Apology
The
president apparently saw his lateness as the normal Ghanaian attitude
towards time, as he failed to offer an apology to the diplomats and even
the traditional leaders who had also waited for him several hours under
the hot sun.
Korean Envoy
It would
be recalled that the Ghanaian attitude to time and late attendance to
programmes of national importance received a backlash from the Korean
Ambassador and a team of Korean engineers at a workshop held in Accra in
September this year
Lyeo Woon-Ki, the
ambassador, criticised the conduct of the officials of the Ministry of
Transport after waiting for almost one hour at a workshop to solicit the
inputs of stakeholders for a master plan project for Accra, in which
the Korean government had provided a $1.5 million funding with technical
expertise.
No comments:
Post a Comment