Mahama Did Not Resolve Dumsor

I am not the least bit interested in defending anybody in the Jinapor-Dumsor Conundrum or rather to-do, other than to lay bare the facts as many of us avid watchers of our national political scene have espied the same for quite some time now. The fact of the matter is that there was always something fishy and bizarre about how Mr. John Abdulai Jinapor got named to the post of Deputy Power Minister, once the Ministry of Power got custom-tailored by the then-President John Dramani Mahama for Dr. Kwabena Donkor, the National Democratic Congress’ Member of Parliament for Pru-East Constituency, in the former Brong-Ahafo Region.

I just Googled to find out where Pru-East is presently located, perhaps in the Bono-East Region. But Google does not seem to have upgraded its data on the former Brong-Ahafo Region. But it is, nevertheless, clear to me that Mr. John Jinapor was very likely named to the contract-saturated Power Ministry, as Dr. Donkor’s deputy, to haul “home” chunks of the metaphorical bacon. With Little Dramani, of course, it is also about cutting deals at the expense of the Ghanaian taxpayer and pocketing payola moneys in some offshore bank accounts. Forbes’ List of the Richest Ghanaians hints at this much. At any rate, this aspect of John Jinapor’s history as a politician needs to be further probed for some clarity, because this Mahama pet, the other widely known Mahama pet is Mr. Mahama Ayariga, does not seem to have brought any specialized knowledge to the job, besides his bean counter’s credentials and money management skills. At least as written down on paper. You know what I mean, Dear Reader?

But what really flabbergasted me, coming to the composition of the present column, was Mr. Jinapor’s vehement public denial that he had anything to do with the AKSA Energy Deal, whose transactional integrity recently came under some serious questioning. Regarding the latter, the former Mahama Chief-of-Staff deviously claimed to have known absolutely nothing about AKSA, because, somehow, the latter was the exclusive baby of Dr. Donkor. Does the Reader get my simple character profiling of Mr. John Jinapor here? You see, this is a man who, strikingly like his former boss, has absolutely no problem in sharing credit for whatever went right at the Power Ministry but would, somehow, have absolutely no share in the responsibility of whatever might have gone wrong at the same ministry or department.

As I vividly recall, the British-educated Dr. Donkor was ceded his Power Ministry sometime early 2013 by the then-President Mahama, after the Pru-East NDC-MP made a passionate appeal on the august floor of Parliament to the magical effect that he was capable of arresting Dumsor, the country’s erratic electricity supply, within 12 months, and that if he was incapable of doing so, Mr. Mahama had every right to fire him, which was pretty much what actually occurred. But Dr. Donkor, as I vividly recall, was able to overstay his self-imposed mandate. He was on the job for at least some 15 to 17 months, before a visibly desperate-to-be-reelected President Mahama relieved him of his cabinet post, to no one’s particular joy or delight, because the problem had not been resolved. To be certain, by the time that Dr. Donkor was relieved of his cabinet portfolio, Dumsor had actually gotten worse. The entire idea of custom-tailoring the Power Ministry for Dr. Donkor was rather absurd, because there already existed an Energy Ministry. Now, let’s talk about Mahama’s notion of small government. I believe Mr. Jinapor was also the Deputy Minister of the Energy Ministry.

Dr. Donkor had not presented Mr. Mahama with any comprehensive proposal demonstrating precisely how he intended to arrest Dumsor. That ought to tell Ghanaians the sort of citizen that they have elected as their President in the 2012 Presidential Election. Of course, we all know that it was his fellow northerner, Justice William Atuguba, who had shamelessly engineered the presidency of Little Dramani. So, what was the purpose of transferring the Yapei, Gonja, native from the Energy Ministry to the Power Ministry? You see, by the close of 2015, the resolution of Dumsor was nowhere in sight. Which is why it is hard to believe Mr. Jinapor’s assertion that by March 2016, the then New Patriotic Party’s Vice-Presidential Candidate, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, was, somehow, traipsing the length and breadth of the country claiming that his main political opponent, that is, Mr. Mahama, had effectively resolved the Dumsor Conundrum. Well, as the saying goes, we need the “Fiili-Fiili” evidence from Mr. Jinapor. “Show us the money,” Mr. Jinapor, as New Yorkers are wont to say. Show us the videotape.

This assay at cheap and tawdry propaganda gimmickry is nothing new. For example, we have heard Mr. Samuel Okudzeto-Ablakwa, the former Education Minister, outrageously claim that it was his former boss who actually implemented the Akufo-Addo-authored fee-free Senior High School Policy Initiative. The good news here is that ultimately, it is those who lived protracted four-and-half years of Dumsor, and not thievish political fat cats and whole-cloth fabricators like the Yapei NDC-MP, who will decide who gets to rule Ghana for the next four years.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

August 4, 2020

E-mail: [email protected]