What Is Good for Afari-Gyan Is Also Good for Jean Mensa

I have been saying in recent weeks that in order to fully appreciate the evil nature and intentions of the leaders of Ghana’s main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), one has to read their national addresses and press releases from the bottom up. The last paragraph of Candidate John Dramani Mahama’s rather preposterous response to the Anin Yeboah-presided Supreme Court decision granting the Jean Adukwei Mensa-chaired Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) the go-ahead with the compilation of a new National Biometric Voters’ Register (NBVR), was this scandalously ironic and morally and intellectually insulting quote from the late Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, the least democratic royal coup-plotting African leader in the Twentieth Century:

“Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph” (See “New Voters’ Roll: We’re Disappointed, Strongly Disagree with Supreme Court Confused Verdict – Mahama” Modernghana.com 6/26/20).

It is quite obvious that Candidate Mahama was cheaply appealing to the recently transplanted or returnee Rastafarian Community in Ghana. But you see, their rather quaint Haile Selassie Hero Worship and all, by and large, the Rastafarians are far and away light years more politically savvy than thievish and thoroughgoing corrupt NDC scam-artist leaders like former President John Dramani Mahama, the man who continues to vehemently deny, even in the face of overwhelming evidence from Britain’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO) and the latter’s collaborative counterparts in France and the United States of America, that he took the whopping payola sum of $ 5 Million (USD) to inflate the purchasing price of some three military aircraft meant for use by personnel of the Ghana Armed Forces (GAF).

That was money belonging to the Ghanaian taxpayer. Candidate Mahama has absolutely no respect for law and order, as was clearly demonstrated when he rode roughshod over the decision of the Chief Justice Georgina Theodora Wood-presided Supreme Court of Ghana in the matter of the infamous Montie Three/Trio of Mahama agitprop shills, namely, Messrs. Salifu Maase (aka Mugabe), Godwin Ako Gunn and Alistair Nelson who had publicly threatened to have Mrs. Wood royally raped and several members of the Apex Court assassinated and literally dismembered. Back then, in 2016, or thereabouts, the then-President John Dramani Mahama used his executive powers to summarily cancel out the Supreme Court sentencing of the Montie Three to 4 months’ imprisonment at the Nsawam Medium-Security Prison. That terrorist threat also was about the righteous agitation by the leaders of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) to have the heavily contaminated National Voters’ Register (NVR) cleaned up. So, this is a battle that has been raging for quite some time now, the sophistic and hypocritical pretense by the NDC leaders about the current Voters’ Register (VR) having been used in several significant elections, thereby making it valid, notwithstanding.

Essentially, what the Supreme Court said in its all-too-predictable ruling against the self-infatuated and self-serving imperious leaders of the National Democratic Congress, the very political scammers who criminally colluded with Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan in 2012 to create some 35 new parliamentary seats, with barely 4 months before that year’s general election, is that the Jean Mensa-headed Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) is fundamentally entitled to the same constitutional rights and mandate that Dr. Afari-Gyan brazenly claimed both empowered and authorized him to create those parliamentary seats at whim, however politically or morally untenable the present situation may seem. It is also rather absurd for Candidate Mahama, the then-President John Dramani Mahama, to have decorated Dr. Afari-Gyan with the highest civilian State Order for rigging the 2012 general election in favor of the Mahama-led National Democratic Congress but, somehow, Mrs. Jean Adukwei Mensa has absolutely no right to either deconstruct or thoroughly dismantle the vote-rigging apparatus that literally enabled the longest-reigning Electoral Commissioner to get away with political genocide.

The Mahama post-Supreme Court Decision press statement clearly sounded like a Pre-Election 2020 Concession Speech, so we are glad that finally the man who deliberately bungled police investigations into the bedroom-stabbing assassination of Mr. JB Danquah-Adu, even while also heartily celebrating the “mysterious” death of the-President John Evans Atta-Mills as an auspicious act of Divine Providence, has at least seen the Biblical Handwriting on the Wall well ahead of time and may very well be coming out of his pathological funk of denial. Candidate Mahama rather artlessly claims that the decision by the Independent Electoral Commission to create a new Voters’ Register is apt to induce a fertile ground for the upsurge of the COVID-19 Pandemic, but the pathological cynic and megalomaniac in the same Candidate Mahama sees absolutely nothing wrong with him not calling for the postponement of the 2020 general election until such time that the COVID-19 Pandemic would have significantly subsided to benign levels of infection and spread, since going to the polls in December also entails the exact same risk as registering to vote.

Predictably, Candidate Mahama also disingenuously and farcically claims that the Supreme Court-proscribed use of the old Voters’ ID Card would prevent an overwhelming number of prospective NDC voters from reregistering to vote during the compilation of the new Voters Register, because these NDC-sponsored illegally resident foreign nationals would have a difficult time proving the authenticity of their nonexistent Ghanaian citizenship. This is rather farcical because it is precisely this very criminal contamination of the current National Voters’ Register that Mrs. Mensa and her IEC associates are hard at work, trying to make Ghana the greenest and cleanest democratic culture in the West African subregion, if not the entire African Continent. We have already discussed the fact that permitting the use of the old NDC-issued Voters’ ID Cards would be unwisely tantamount to fetching water with a wicker basket, a veritable exercise in futility.

Candidate Mahama also accuses the Akufo-Addo-led ruling New Patriotic Party of socioeconomic and political exclusivity but, in fact, the truth of the matter is that it was the accuser’s own party, the National Democratic Congress, that caused the December 17, 2019 Referendum, aimed at the democratization of the selection and appointment of our District, Municipal and Metropolitan Chief Executives (MMDCEs) to be scandalously and unwisely scrapped. The National Democratic Congress also vehemently opposed the John Agyekum-Kufuor-fangled National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) as a pipedream, and the Akufo-Addo-implemented fee-free Senior High School System as a financially wasteful policy initiative that would significantly depreciate the “high quality” of Ghana’s elitist public-education system. Somebody more sober and levelheaded should tell Candidate Mahama that a Cash-and-Carry Healthcare Policy has absolutely nothing politically or economically inclusive or attractive about it.

And so is the summary abrogation of the Nurse- and Teacher-Trainee and other professional trainee allowances, even while allowing his cabinet and executive appointees to take home double salaries an enlightened policy of inclusivity. Ghanaians must be fed up with such shameless demagoguery by now.

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

June 27, 2020

E-mail: [email protected]