Listen to the Airbus Scam Artist Spew Absurdities

It is as vacuous as his four-and-half-year Dumsor-inflected rule, or properly speaking, misrule, that also witnessed the most depraved and morally reckless and asinine and wasteful use of state-funded private detectives to thoroughly destroy Ghana’s judicial establishment, so that he could get away with his wanton embezzlement of the Ghanaian taxpayer’s money and his long-running scheme of bribery and corruption. So, it is rather absurd and ironic to hear Candidate John Dramani Mahama insolently claim that President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has set Ghanaian democracy back 28 years (See “John Mahama Writes: The Tragedies of Akufo-Addo” Modernghana.com 8/7/20).

The Gonja Boy luridly supposes that Ghanaian voters have so soon forgotten that it was Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo who, as Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, crafted and put into law, with the executive approval of then President John Agyekum-Kufuor, of course, the landmark Repeal of the Criminal Libel Law, a British colonial-inherited punitive instrument that sought to silence dissent and which the leaders of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) systematically and perennially used to muff up, imprison and torture our boldest and most fearless journalists and other media operatives.

What the preceding means is that at the longest, Ghana’s Fourth Republican Democratic Culture is 20 years old. Now, subtract from the latter figure, the 8 years of the downright socioeconomic and industrial disaster that was the Mills-Mahama regime, having already subtracted the wasted years that were the two-term scandal sheet of the “democratically elected” Rawlings’ years, and we get roughly only 12 years of true democracy in the country. So, it is rather pathetic for Little Dramani to be talking about 28 years of Ghanaian democracy. I don’t suppose the overwhelming majority of Ghanaian citizens to envisage the NDC-fangled “Identification Haircuts” to be part of what Mr. Mahama reckons to be 28 years of Ghanaian democracy.

The blatant coverup of the bedroom stabbing-death of Mr. JB Danquah-Adu, which former President John Dramani Mahama personally supervised, with the collusion of extant Inspector-General of Police (IGP), Mr. John Kudalor, must be counted as one of the most glorious moments of the sort of the Golden Age of NDC-minted democracy that Mr. Mahama would have Ghanaians heartily celebrate, to the downright damnation of President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo. When he cavalierly maligns the advisable use of our military to stop foreign nationals from illegally voting to decide who becomes Ghana’s next President, Little Dramani hopelessly banks on the hope that Ghanaians may have so soon forgotten the fact that throughout most of the period leading up to the 2016 general election, the Bole-Bamboi native was fully decked in ceremonial military uniforms and military fatigues, for a man with absolutely no experience of serving in any of the branches of the Ghana Armed Forces.

He may also have conveniently forgotten the fact that in the leadup to Election 2016, Mr. Mahama massed up at least one battalion of military personnel in the Eastern Region. What do you think such provocative massing up of heavily armed soldiers in Koforidua and its environs was intended to do, but to intimidate the residents of the political stronghold of the then-President Mahama’s main political opponent and most formidable challenger for the Presidency? As the jaded saying goes: “Those who live in straw huts must not play with fire.” Now, speaking of harassment: What did Little Dramani think he was doing, when he stood before a full-session of the Akyem-Abuakwa Traditional Council, with the butterball Mr. Julius Debrah, his toe-licking substitute Chief-of-Staff, and called Kyebi the Galamsey Capital of Ghana? While his equally grubby younger brother, Mr. Ibrahim Mahama, literally laid the pristine landscape of Akyem-Tafo and its environs to waste by erosion.

I wish I could believe that Little Dramani understood what the restoration of “dignity” and “independence” to our state institutions meant. What with Mrs. Lordina Mahama’s benighted promotion of the establishment of Witch Villages and Witch Camps in the five “northern regions,” and the barbaric stoning death of Maame Akua Denteh, the 90-year-old Gonja native from Mr. Mahama’s Akufo-Addo-created Savannah Region? At any rate, why has Candidate Mahama been screaming his lungs out to have the criminal assassin of Mr. Adams Mahama, the then Upper-East Chairman of the New Patriotic Party, Mr. Gregory Afoko, released from prison custody? Is this also part of the “depoliticization” of our democratic institutions? Come on, Airbus Mahama, you can’t fool anybody.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

August 7, 2020

E-mail: [email protected]