Okubra Ampomah Is Just Another Mahama Toady

When the Gyaasehene, Head of the Kitchen Cabinet to the substantive Chief of Assin-Wurakese, Nana Okubra Ampomah, says that he would not be the least bit surprised if President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo does not win the majority of the votes cast in his Assin-Central Constituency in the December 2020 General Election, he says absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. The fact of the matter is that it has been only in such Kangaroo Francophone West African Republics like Guinea, Togo, Benin, Senegal and La Côte D’Ivoire (The Ivory Coast), where in the past Incumbent Presidential Candidates had clinched 90-percentage-plus of the votes.

The same case scenario, of course, characterized the so-called Nkrumah’s Ghana. In Ghana, the postcolonial leader who comes closest to the kind of electoral scam rigged up by the Kwame Nkrumah-led and tautologically named Convention People’s Party (CPP) regime is former President Jeremiah John Rawlings and his National Democratic Congress’ briefcase or portmanteau political party, as Mr. Johnson Asiedu-Nketia, the dynastic General-Secretary of the NDC, once characterized the proprietary iron grips of the Rawlings family on the institutional establishment and apparatus of the National Democratic Congress (NDC).

What is more, even Mr. Kennedy Ohene Agyapong, the incumbent New Patriotic Party’s Member of Parliament for the Assin-Central Constituency, has bitterly complained that although he has personally done more than any individual politician and the central government to improve the living standards of his constituents, nevertheless, residents from towns and villages like Assin-Wurakese have consistently and repeatedly refused to massively vote to get him reelected every electoral season, ever since Mr. Agyapong became their National Assembly Representative (See “Akufo-Addo Has Failed Us, I Won’t Be Surprised If He Loses in My Area – Chief Laments” Kasapa-FM / Ghanaweb.com 9/22/20).

Nana Okubra Ampomah’s rather cynical prognosis is also not the least bit impressive or original, because it scandalously fails to necessarily take into account the fact that when it comes to human-resource development, or the significant improvement in the quality of the lives of Ghanaian, by the comprehensive implementation of social intervention programs for citizens all across the nation, President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo is absolutely without compare or rival in the Fourth-Republican Era. For instance, Nana Okubra Ampomah glaringly fails to acknowledge the fact that former President John “Akonfem-Kanazoe” Dramani Mahama fiercely fought against the Akufo-Addo-implemented fee-free Senior High School System, thereby significantly contributing to the insufferable level of functional illiteracy and a high unemployment rate among Ghanaian youths, thereby causing an exponential increase in the level of such social vices as drug dealing and drug addiction, armed robbery and theft, prostitution and other antisocial activities and the high spate of violent crimes in the country.

Nana Okubra Ampomah also appears to be too morally and intellectually superficial to recognize the significant economic benefits accrued to the wallets and bank accounts of the parents and guardians of attendees of the fee-free Senior High School Policy Initiative, for only one salient or major example. As well, the Gyaasehene of Assin-Wurakese is much rather too smallminded not to recognize the humongous investment made by President Akufo-Addo in the John Agyekum-Kufuor-implemented National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), which the previous Mahama-led regime of the National Democratic Congress inexcusably albeit predictably grossly mismanaged and thoroughly bankrupted under the stewardship of the Mahama-appointed Mr. Sylvester Mensah, the Executive-Director of the National Health Insurance Authority (NHIA), whom the now-Candidate Mahama put under house arrest and had both his passports and bank accounts frozen but never brought to justice.

What is the use of a nominally “upgraded” clinic to the practically dysfunctional status of a polyclinic that has no fully-qualified medical doctors and nurses, because former President Mahama myopically and regressively and criminally canceled the age-old nurse-trainees’ allowances, and also flatly refused to adequately fund the country’s medical schools? Nana Okubra Ampomah needs to put on his proverbial thinking cap, if, indeed, he has any, before he soon finds the very stool from which he derives his authority abruptly and rudely removed from under his butts and cheaply sold to the Managing-Director of the Engineers and Planners Limited Liability Company. If today the roads of Assin-Wurakese are as deplorable as Nana Okubra Ampomah claims, such neglect on the part of the central government definitely did not begin under the watch of Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo. Rather, it began with the pathologically incompetent and vacuously grandstanding Little Dramani, who dubiously claims to be the King of Infrastructural Development in Ghana.

Indeed, if I were President Akufo-Addo, I would earnestly plead with Nana Okubra Ampomah to cast his ballot ten times over in favor of Candidate John “Airbus” Dramani Mahama. After all, what is the real value of the ballot of a psychologically wobbly chief like Nana Okubra Ampomah?

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

October 24, 2020

E-mail: [email protected]