Kweku Ananse Mahama Caught with His Pants Down

As it is naturally to be expected, Candidate John Dramani Mahama has been traipsing the country trying to deceive the Ghanaian electorate in a bid to getting himself back into the Presidential Suite at Jubilee House. What Ghanaian voters need to remember, first and foremost, is that the then-President John Dramani Mahama, in the runup to the 2016 Presidential Election, disdainfully told the same Ghanaian voters whose mandate Mr. Kweku Ananse Mahama is now “humbly” seeking that they had absolutely no constitutional right to presume to criticize his abysmal job performance because, unlike President John Dramani Mahama, himself, none of these critics had ever been democratically elected and sent to Jubilee House to run the affairs of our country.

Back then, Mr. Mahama also told the nation and anybody who cared to listen that he had only two “Presidential Classmates” or peers in the country, namely, former Presidents Jeremiah John Rawlings and John Agyekum-Kufuor. So, you see, what all eligible Ghanaian voters, including staunch members and supporters, as well as sympathizers, of Mr. Mahama’s own political party, the National Democratic Congress, ought to be asking him is why, all of a sudden, in the leadup to the 2020 Presidential Election, Little Dramani has now so rudely decided to insult their intelligence, once again, by appealing to them for their votes, obviously, to be afforded another chance to spit in their faces and defecate on their pates or on top of their heads.

But, of course, the preceding instance is not the only one of its kind in which the Bole-Bamboi native has taken Ghanaian voters for granted. Presently, the former Rawlings’ Communications Minister has been touring the country and telling the very Teacher Trainees whose age-old professional-training allowances he so wickedly withdrew, that, somehow, Little Dramani did them a great favor by forcing them to take student loans instead of continuing to draw these direly needed professional-training allowances. Now, as it is naturally to be expected, the criminally extorted Teacher Trainees have begun to fight back. And they are fighting back with a vengeance.

Recently, for example, the members of an organization calling itself Teachers and Trainees Advocacy (TTA) demanded that Candidate John Dramani Mahama promptly stop deceiving the Ghanaian public into believing that the scandalous and politically insensitive decision to abrogate their longstanding professional-trainee grant allowances, and replacing the same with student-loan burdens was the best and most efficient pro-student policy initiative implemented by his government (See “Stop Deceiving Ghanaians About Cancellation of Trainee Allowance – Mahama Told” DailyGuideNetWork.com / Ghanaweb.com 7/15/20).

According to Teachers and Trainees Advocacy, not only did the newly established “Loan-Allowance System” place a lot of emotional and psychological stress on the student trainees, unlike the old visionary and economically and politically conscientious student-allowance grant system, “only about 30 percent of student trainees were able to go through the ordeals and difficult qualifying conditions to access the student loan, from the years 2013 to 2016, when the student allowance was cancelled.”

What the foregoing and the following data means is that, even as a payback system, about 70-percent of the Mahama- and Jane Naana Opoku-Agyemang-victimized Teacher Trainees – remember that the Mahama running-mate was the substantive Education Minister – could not access the student-allowance replacement or substitute. If this is not a striking example of the gross incompetence of the Mahama-led regime of the National Democratic Congress, one does not know what else it is. It would also be very interesting to learn precisely how much money had been deposited into the “Student-Allowance Loan Fund,” which may very well explain the stingy and niggardly manner in which the loan-accessing process was laid out.

Very likely, as was widely alleged to have been the case with the Sylvester Mensah-run National Health Insurance Authority (NHIA), the overwhelming bulk of the funding for the Opoku-Agyemang-cobbled “Student-Allowance Loan Fund” went into oiling up the 2016 Mahama Presidential Campaign. So much for these kleptocratic Kweku Ananse Games.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

July 17, 2020

E-mail: [email protected]