Failed Mahama Cannot Hide behind ESLA to Make Hay out of Recent Dumsor Challenges

The Serial and the Dynastic Presidential Candidate of the country’s main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), Mr. John “European Airbus Payola” Dramani Mahama, continues to predictably dig himself into a deeper hole of lies as he desperately attempts to fault the President, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, for supposedly tampering with the so-called Energy Sector Levy Act (ESLA), passed in 2015, that did absolutely nothing to meliorate the scourge of Dumsor, that is, the perennially erratic supply of both hydro- and thermal electricity in the country (See “Dumsor: I advised Akufo-Addo not to touch ESLA – Mahama reveals” Modernghana.com 4/9/24).

The Energy Sector Levy Act, it is significant to note, was passed by the ragtag Mahama regime to raise revenue to liquidate huge debts accumulated over decades that had significantly contributed to the nation's steadily mounting debts. Mr. Mahama’s claim that Nana Akufo-Addo had rudely and literally brushed off his admonishment not to tamper with ESLA, so that the latter could exclusively be used to kill off the country’s humongous energy debts, does not hold water because it was on December 31, 2015, the same day of the passage of ESLA, that the Minister of the custom-tailored or specially created Power Ministry, Dr. Kwabena Donkor, was summarily expelled from the Mahama cabinet for having royally failed to resolve the Dumsor blight, the sole rationale or reason for which the Power Ministry had been created by the Bole-Bamboi native from the Akufo-Addo-created Savannah Region.

Now, if, indeed, as Candidate-General John “Gnassingbe” Dramani Mahama so self-righteously claims, his immediate successor had ignored his advice not to tamper with ESLA, then, of course, it goes without saying that the former New Patriotic Party’s Member of Parliament for Akyem-Abuakwa-South, in the Eastern Region, did the absolutely Honest-to-God right thing, which explains the fact that for several years, Ghanaians enjoyed a continuous and an uninterrupted supply of electricity or energy to the laudable extent that hundreds of thousands of citizens of Nigeria, the most populous country and the largest economy in the ECOWAS Subregion, began to swamp the country, on the perfectly reasonable grounds that Ghana was the one ECOWAS nation in which they could comfortably settle and run their business enterprises without the sort of peevish and business-unfriendly environment created by the Dumsor-dominated previous Mahama-led regime of the National Democratic Congress.

We are reliably informed that Candidate Mahama told this whole cloth of criminally mendacious narrative to some members of the Ghana Union of Traders Association (GUTA) on Monday, April 8, 2024, that is, on the same day that Truly Yours turned 63 years old. It, obviously, was a bad-luck day for Yagbonwura Okogufuo Kwame Gonja, as the reader can see from the preceding incontrovertible exposition of the grim and the ironic reality. According to the man who told private Ghanaian businessmen and women to use their “common sense” to “creatively” negotiate their work schedules around the rhythmless vagaries of Dumsor because he, the then-President Mahama, was not Divine Providence to be expected to turn on the lights uninterruptedly, now smugly claims that the Energy Sector Levy Act has, since its passage, generated in excess of GH₡30 billion under the watch of President Akufo-Addo.

Interestingly and quite predictably, however, Candidate Mahama did not tell his GUTA audience exactly how much ESLA had generated or raked in during the approximately two years that he was the Chief Resident of Jubilee House. He also conveniently failed to remind his audience that his cabinet appointees had been drawing home, criminally comfortably, double salaries, at the same time that the infamous Rawlings-appointed “Shit-Bomber” was smugly disparaging then-Candidate Akufo-Addo’s promise of the implementation of the Fee-Free Senior High School System, the abject and woeful lack of which rendered at least a Quarter-Million (250,000) talented and able-bodied Senior High School-Qualified Youths virtually homeless and destitute.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
April 10, 2024
E-mail: [email protected]