Candidate Opoku-Agyemang’s Cheap, Populist Talk Was Nothing Short of Embarrassing – Part 5 (Final)

It is quite clear that the writer of Candidate Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang’s Running-Mate’s Acceptance Speech, just like the Serial and the Dynastic Presidential Candidate of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), takes Ghanaians for some pansies and arrant fools, or both the speechwriter and the reader, in case they happen not to be one and the same person, abjectly lack any serious sense of personal morality and decency.

You see, Dear Reader, a politician who roundly rejected the democratization of access to the Akufo-Addo-implemented Fee-Free Senior High School System via the equitable implementation of the dual-shift system which, by the way, has existed in the country since Independence and, perhaps, even well before, cannot be taken seriously by playing Nintendo games or fast-and-loose with Candidate-General John “Gnassingbe” Dramani Mahama’s veritable pipedream that is the so-called 24-Hour Economy, which Candidate Opoku-Agyemang mischievously and “plagiaristically” informs Ghanaian citizens and voters, is squarely based on the same “multi-shift” Fee-Free SHS System roundly pooh-poohed by the latter and her boss, both of who claim has been functionally chaotic and, at best, as good as never implemented! Here, in the United States of America, we often say that Candidates Mahama and Opoku-Agyemang can simply not have it both ways.

But, of course, what is even more comical and inexcusably absurd, to be certain, is when the quondam Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cape Coast also informs her audience in the Main Auditorium of the University of Professional Studies in Accra, that the so-called Mahama-sloganized 24-Hour Economy “is a vision [that is] anchored on the firm belief that with the right policies and incentives in place, we can inspire a new generation of enterprises to adopt a multi-shift work system and wider participation in the economy, thereby ushering us into a new golden era of Ghanaian industry.”

Now, the next most logical question to ask Candidate Opoku-Agyemang is precisely what kind of “right policies and incentives” is she talking about here? As well, what occupational and/or economic and labor theories inform such unnamed policies? Even more significantly, what preparations have the movers-and-the-shakers and the Social Darwinian apparatchiks of the National Democratic Congress, the very people who recklessly and criminally tore down President Kwame Nkrumah’s seminal industrial legacy of the Ghana Industrial Holdings Corporation (GIHOC), concretely made towards the implementation and the realization of such policies on the ground, as it were?

As was recently pointed out by Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia, an Oxbridge-schooled crackerjack economist, Chop Bars and Mining Companies in the country already run a 24-Hour Shift Economic System. So, what is really new here or economically unprecedented in the political economy of our postcolonial or even Fourth-Republican Ghana that the “Apostles of Impossibilities” – my profound apologies to Dr. Bawumia – want to contribute to the economic development of our beloved Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana this late in the game?

You see, a person trained in the Liberal Arts can easily get away with such patently vacuous pontifical abstractions and plain inanities; unfortunately, however, in the Social Sciences, the disciplinary expertise of people like the widely presumed Next President of our beloved Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana, to wit, Candidate Mahamudu Bawumia, we have to deal with the practical realities of daily bread and butter concerns in the right here and now. Then, also, there is this nonsensical bromide about the need for Ghanaian “Women to become millionaires too,” almost as if the age-old phenomenon of women as major bread winners of Ghanaian society, especially Akan society, was a very recent postcolonial importation from the West or elsewhere around the globe.

She obviously may not be aware of the fact that, for only a passing tangential example, both great-grandmothers of Yours Truly, namely, Asante-Juaben Dehyeε Nana Adwoa Apeakoramaa of Kyebi-Aburaso and Adadientem, and Anwonsenhemaa Nana Owarewaa of Adanse and Akyem-Nkronso, were commercial transport owners in just as recently as the 1950s and the early 1960s! Now, I make this tangential observation to admonish Candidate Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang to desist from presumptuously projecting her own epic ignorance and arrogance and deliberately cultivated condescension and passing off the same as being factually representative of the socioeconomic status and the destiny of each and every Ghanaian woman, for the morally opportunistic purpose of scoring cheap electioneering-campaign points. You see, the overwhelming majority of Ghanaian women are not that naïve.

And by the way, has Naana Opoku-Agyemang ever heard of the late Ms. Grace Dansowaa, the legendary Ghanaian business mogul from Okwawu-Obo, in particular what the late Chairman Rawlings and his Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) Abongo Boys and Girls have been widely alleged to have savagely meted her and hardworking and resourceful women like her? You see, Naana Opoku-Agyemang is darn sheepishly aware of the unspeakable degree of wanton socioeconomic acts of envy-laced barbarism unleashed against hardworking and genuinely resourceful Ghanaian women in the recent past by both the past and the present leadership of the PNDC and the present political establishment of the Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings-founded National Democratic Congress.

Which is precisely why the Mahama political sidekick would have Ghanaian citizens and voters unwisely overlook the unspeakable degree of socioeconomic depravity and the mind-boggling magnitude of bestial destruction wreaked on the country by the self-righteous and kleptomaniacal faux Apostles of Accountability, Probity, Transparency and Justice and, instead, deviously and sophistically prefers to cast her mind into the cosmic vacuum or empty space that is Ancient Ghanaian History for answers to problems created by fellow faux-socialist ideological truckers such as herself.

But trust me, Naana Jane, a sizeable majority of Ghanaian citizens are much more civilized, intelligent and politically astute and sophisticated than you and your payola-addicted boss suppose or could fathom in a millennium. We are also endowed with the deepest reach of mnemonic thrust among the comity of global humanity to allow ourselves be so easily deceived.

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

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