Open Letter To H.E John Dramani MAHAMA - Coalition of Ghana Students Leaders Alliance (COGSLA)

His Excellency, I wish you Merry Christmas in advance. I hope for the purposes of this letter you don’t mind if I address you in a more informal manner.

I will go straight to the point since I know you are a very busy person.

First of all, I want to say I am happy you lost the election. However, this letter is not to rub salt into your wounds but to share a few thoughts you can reflect on for the future.

I must say I was disappointed in the type of people you surrounded yourself with. I cringed at the level of reasoning people like Koku Anyidoho, Kofi Adams, Ofosu Kwakye, Otukonor, Fiifi Kwetey, Omane Boamah, Sam George and the usual gang put up in the media. Sometimes I was embarrassed for you. “Koku, tell us one social intervention policy the NDC government has introduced” and Koku replies; “water is life and we have taken water to Kyebi”. These were the type of people speaking for the NDC and the government. I am sure Ghanaians can give us many such examples.

His Excellency, you must understand that many of us are not stupid. We are educated and we are very intelligent and we felt very insulted by the poverty of your guys’ reasoning.

We were also disappointed and insulted by the quality of your appointees with appointment of people like Yamin, Oti Bless, Fiifi Kwetey and co. For example, Oti Bless had no clue what his surname was and his academic qualifications also sounded dubious. Am sure many of us felt insulted that our beloved Ghana had such characters in government.

Whilst the likes of Dr. Bawumia was dazzling us with sound intelligent analysis, your team only focused on spewing insults without any sound counter-arguments.

Therefore as a leader you failed to put our best foot forward in terms of your appointees and that was very disappointing.

As for corruption, it was like football commentary; Woyome passes the ball to Gyeda, Gyeda dribbles one man, he passes the ball to SADA, SADA traps the ball beautifully and lays a long diagonal pass to Smarrtys…. Mr. President I could go on and on. Ironically, we didn’t see any decisive action from you and some of your appointees even openly defended these grave acts of corruption. Let me add that it baffled many of us when after everything your government clandestinely sole-sourced an $8m contract to Woyome. Why? Mr. President why?

Mr. President, your gang of babies with sharp teeth led by the likes of grown men like Koku Anyidoho and supported by Kofi Adams and the usual suspects focused on insulting the personality of Nana Addo. They spewed vicious lies about him and attempted to belittle his achievements when every intelligent person knows he’s one of the most distinguished lawyers in Ghana’s history. We also know he has spent his whole life being an advocate for democracy in Ghana. To cap the insults they kept stating emphatically that he will never be president. I am sure many neutrals were motivated to prove them wrong because we believed they were not God.

Let me add that the way comic characters like Bukom Banku, Mzbel, Akua Donkor and co abused your name was also despicable.

Mr. President, we also felt insulted by the lies and arrogance of your appointees. They lied and lied and lied and didn’t give a hoot what we thought. Once they had a microphone they spewed it. I sympathize with you on that score because I am reliably informed that they lied to you till the end. When the whole world knew you had lost the election by an embarrassing margin, your team kept lying to you that you were in a comfortable lead so that prevented you from conceding early and because the EC also wanted you to bow out with honour they had to hold all of us to ransom before they announced the obvious.

The level of incompetence by your team was not only in government, it was translated to election management. I am reliably informed that the NDC only started collating the figures at about 10pm on election date. They arrogantly thought we were stupid enough to put our votes on auto pilot.

Mr. President, who also advised the campaign team to do that media blitz? You bought all the airtime across most media platforms and you thought it wasn’t repulsive? We were repulsed and we couldn’t wait to kick you out because we knew it was our money and we knew it was just being wasted.

Mr. President, I was gravely disappointed in you with the type of divisive and tribal campaign you run in the North. It seemed you had become an unrepentant tribalist after pulling the same stunt 4years ago. It seemed as if during every election period you forget you are the President of Ghana. As President your job is to bring people together and not divide us. Playing our Northern brothers against Akans was shameful and I am happy our brothers up North rejected your divisive politics. No wonder the NPP picked up 5 seats in the Upper West Region for the first time.

I was also gravely disappointed in the type of person you had become. Many years ago, there was this affable John Mahama who was considered a great communicator. However, over the years you became a poor communicator and spoke with disdain and arrogance in your tone when referring to your political opponents. We remember your Opana jibes and “you can’t criticise me because you have not been president before” jibes. Meanwhile you were an unrepentant critic of the NPP government before you became president. You also told us we had short memories, you told us it was the height of mediocrity for governments to campaign on infrastructure meanwhile your 2016 campaign was focused on that same infrastructure argument.

One reason Nana Addo trashed you convincingly was that he was everything you were not; civil, statesmanlike, calm, humble, affable. Even avowed critics fell in love with his demeanour during the campaign.

Mr. President, as for the management of the economy I don’t want to go there because Bawumia has drummed it home enough. I just want to ask a simple question; after saying you will never restore nursing training allowance, why did you flip flop by making some payments on table tops? You think they were stupid?

I pray that as you leave office may Jehovah God make you more humble, may he give you the grace to identify liars, the wisdom to appoint intelligent and civil people, may he give you the courage to right all the wrongs and may he make purge you of your shameful tribal tendencies that pits brother against brother.

Please, I forgot one thing, as per your logic, the NPP organized a primary and put together 18 people to prevent Aliu Mahama who was then Vice President to become the NPP’s Presidential Candidate. Will you support Amissah-Arthur for “Agenda 2020”?

Have a lovely day Mr. President.
Yours faithfully, Matasa K Blay
Director General, COGSLA