Liar Mahama’s Pants on Fire!

Well, I have always maintained that former President John Dramani Mahama is a congenitally compulsive liar who is not even good at making up credible-sounding lies. Well, just within a couple of days after he reportedly invited locally resident members of the global diplomatic corps to the screening of some video clips purportedly exposing the members of a vigilante group that were supposedly sicced on members, supporters and sympathizers of the main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) by operatives of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP), it has predictably come to light that, after all, the uniformed men shown in the Mahama video clips had absolutely nothing to do with the January 31^st Ayawaso-West Wuogon parliamentary byelection disturbances, during which the cheap-sympathy-soliciting leaders of the National Democratic Congress, led by former President John Dramani Mahama, claimed to have had their supporters and sympathizers brutally assaulted by vigilante operatives recruited by the ruling party. Remember how these key NDC operatives cheaply capitalized on the “mysterious” death of President John Evans Atta-Mills to score cheap political points? The infamous Mahama “naturalization” crocodile tears before the chiefs and people of Cape Coast?

Now, talking of plagiarism, it turns out that one of the video clips – actually both of them – that were cinematically paraded before members of the diplomatic corps a la Anas Aremeyaw Anas’ class of entertainment journalism, was actually shot nearly a year ago, at the funeral of a Lance-Corporal of the Ghana Police Service (GPS) by the name of Mr. Adu Teiko, who had been tragically felled in the line of duty at Poano-Manso, in the Asante Region (See “Family of Late Cop Exposes Mahama Over Video Showed [sic] to Diplomats” Ghanaweb.com 2/17/19). We are also reliably informed that the second video clip screened to the diplomats and pontifically alleged by Mr. Mahama to have been shot at the funeral of Mr. Emmanuel Kyeremateng Agyarko, the Ayawaso-West Wuogon’s New Patriotic Party’s Member of Parliament, whose death had occasioned the byelection, had also been shot at the funeral of Lance-Corporal Adu Teiko.

It is quite interesting that the former Atta-Mills’ second-bananas, or Vice-President, who was also once an ex-officio Chairman of the Ghana Police Council (GPC), was so naïve as to predicate his contention of the police officers on the video clip being bona fide members of an NPP-recruited vigilante group on the rather flimsy evidence that one of the men was wearing earrings. Well, the former National Democratic Congress’ Member of Parliament for Gonja-West, in the newly created Savannah Region, may not know this, but here in the United States, which sports a remarkable number of the best and brightest cops around the globe, it is quite common to see a highly trained police officer wearing a Rastafarian hairclass, as well as wearing earrings and other kinds of jewelry, especially officers assigned to the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) or as undercover detectives of their law-enforcement establishment. I don’t know what the rules of engagement are for detectives of the Ghana Police Service, but it is equally not unusual to see some of these detectives sporting regular official uniforms at the funerals of their colleagues.

I have often said that voting Mr. Mahama into the Presidency in the wake of the “mysterious” death of President John Evans Atta-Mills, was the greatest mistake ever made by Ghanaian voters. It was bad enough to have voted for the man who spat in the face of the corpse of Prof. Mills, by virulently and contemptuously accusing the latter, posthumously, of having rudely made Mr. Mahama a “Presidential Spare-Tire,” as a substantive Vice-President of the Democratic Republic of Ghana. The tragic irony here, of course, is that as Vice-President to then-President Atta-Mills, Mr. Mahama spent a remarkable amount of his officially salaried tenure negotiating for huge sums of bribes and blindly and voraciously lining up his pockets and wallets and those of his associates and cronies, by his own testimony to both a BBC news reporter and the general Ghanaian public.

And then, as President, the Savannah Region’s most infamous citizen did more to collapse privately owned Ghanaian businesses than any other leader since independence. Indeed, even as I write, Mr. Mahama has been fiercely and desperately fighting for the 2020 presidential nomination of his party, the National Democratic Congress, so that he could return to power for the express purpose of collapsing the Akufo-Addo-implemented and most progressive fee-free Senior High School System, as well as the John Agyekum-Kufuor-implemented National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), which Mr. Mahama effectively bankrupted prior to him leaving office in January 2017.

Now, of course, if he were a responsible leader and the statesman that he clearly could never become, Mr. Mahama would have already gone down on all fours to beg for the forgiveness of both the Adu Teiko Family, whose grief he so callously and cheaply used to score political points, and the Agyarko Family whose image and reputation he so criminally sought to tarnish. Of course, should he fail to do the right and honorable thing, as already observed above, Mr. Mahama could very well be hit with at least two very expensive civil suits. It is also quite clear that whatever respect and sympathy he had with the diplomatic community were promptly eviscerated with the latest exposure of his compulsive penchant for mendacity.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
February 18, 2019
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net