Who Is This Coward Called “Guest Writer?”

Writers of conviction who have confidence in the propagandistic fare which they strategically dish out against their main political opponents, from time to time, would not hide behind such nominal masquerades or facades as “Guest Writer” or “Anonymous.” They invariably sign their petulant and vacuously provocative columns and articles, in our present instance or case in point, by their officially recognized names. Which is why it is very obvious that the author of the article captioned “Hapless NPP Now Seeks Solace in Rawlings' Death” lacks the courage of her/his convictions, that is, assuming even hypothetically that s/he has any.

Now, let me tackle the admittedly very disturbing racket and scandal that is the Agyapa Mineral Royalties Investment Deal. The one salient or significant difference between the Agyapa Deal and the John Dramani Mahama-fangled European Airbus-SE Payola Scandal, for only one example out of a legion, is the question of transparency, one of the four tenets of the so-called Rawlings' Revolution, namely, “Probity, Accountability, Transparency and Justice.” At least the Agyapa Mineral Royalties Investment Deal was duly and legally submitted to a plenary session of Parliament for due diligence scrutiny. So, properly speaking, the possibility of any criminal wrongdoing was literally nipped in the bud, as it were.

In other words, the principal architects of the Agyapa Deal were very bad Wannabe-Mega-Thieves, unlike the perfect crime, relatively speaking, that was committed by the then-Vice-President John Dramani Mahama in the European Airbus-SE Payola Scandal that was globally exposed by the judicial establishments of three of the most significant Western Powers, namely, Britain, France and the United States. It was also the dumbest deal ever to have been contracted by any highly placed government official in Ghana's postcolonial history, in which the relative pittance of some $ 5 Million (USD) was extorted in exchange for the Ghanaian taxpayer's being bilked in a noncompetitive contractual bid to the humongous tune of at least a couple of $ 100 Million (USD). I stand to be corrected on the latter figure, although I am quite sure of the fact that the Ghanaian taxpayer lost at least ten times the payola sum in inflated costs of the three military aircraft purchases involved.

What is more, the key architects of the European Airbus-SE Payola Scandal, foremost among them Mr. John Dramani Mahama, has a long-established track-record of stealing from the Ghanaian taxpayer who has been paying his very handsome salaries and perks, without fail, over the course of at least a decade. For instance, in what has infamously become known as L'Affair Kanazoe or the Mahama-Kanazoe Scam-Artistry, the then-President Mahama publicly admitted to having willfully and criminally extorted the payola “gift” of an American-made Ford Expedition Suburban Utility Vehicle (SUV) valued at the humongous sum of $ 100,000 (USD).

Candidate Mahama has also gone on record as having personally admitted to a reporter from the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) that as Vice-President of Ghana and Arch-Lieutenant to the then-President John Evans Atta-Mills, Mr. Mahama was in the routine habit of both soliciting and receiving bribes from contractors who had official business dealings with the government of the National Democratic Congress. Now, the principal architects of the Agyapa Mineral Royalties Scandal do not come anywhere close to the thievish criminality of the man who has been campaigning on the morally and politically insulting platform of being given another highly unlikely chance by the Ghanaian electorate to be returned to Jubilee House or the Presidency “So that I will be able to correct my past mistakes.” How arrogant of Little Dramani to so cavalierly presume to be entitled to being voted back to power to enable him to capriciously experiment with the destiny, needs and aspirations of the Ghanaian electorate and the Ghanaian citizenry at large.

On the question of the practical relationship between the late Founding-Father of the National Democratic Congress, former President Jerry John Rawlings, and Mr. John Dramani Mahama, the following Rawlings' observation should promptly put paid to any deviously acrobatic attempt by the Mahama Posse and shills to the creation of any chimerical subterfuge for their irreparably self-damaged prime benefactor. And here, also, the late Chairman Rawlings has gone on record, innumerable times, as having said that “John Mahama is the most corrupt Ghanaian leader” in Ghana's postcolonial history, and not just in the history of Ghana's Fourth-Republican dispensation.

The Mahama Scandals are a dozen a pesewa and include the $ 175 Million (USD) that the previous Mahama government contracted with the pretext of using the same to build some hospitals around the country but which, predictably, ended up funding the 2016 Mahama Presidential-Reelection Campaign. As well, the $ 72 Million (USD) SSNIT Scandal, in which the life savings and payroll deductions of hundreds of hardworking Ghanaian civil and public servants were literally embezzled by some Mahama lieutenants. At the time, Mr. Haruna Iddrisu, the double-salary scamming NDC's Parliamentary Leader, was the Labor Minister and the cabinet appointee in charge of the Social Security and National Insurance Trust banking establishment.

It is also inescapably laughable how the apparatchiks of the National Democratic Congress have been desperately pulling teeth and nails to deny the indisputably obvious fact that they are a shameless bunch of presidential corpse-lovers who gloat in luridly using the “mysterious” deaths of their leaders to score cheap political points and craving the undeserved sympathy of the Ghanaian electorate. We saw the Mahama Posse do this in the wake of the highly suspicious passing of the then-President John Evans Atta-Mills; and now, they are hell-bent on doing the same with the death and corpse of former Chairman Jerry John Rawlings. The fact of the matter here, though, is that contrary to what Mr./Ms. “Guest Writer” would have the members of the global Ghanaian community believe, neither the so-called June nor the December 31^st revolutions brought any sustainably significant impact to bear on Ghana's socio-economic development and political culture.

Which was primarily why till the very end of his life, Chairman Rawlings never ceased to bitterly regret having summarily executed Generals Acheampong, FWK Akuffo, Afrifa, Amedume, Utuka, Yaw Boakye, Kotei and Odartey-Wellington, among dozens of other “Enemies of the Revolution,” even amidst the earnest pleas of then US President James “Jimmy” Carter, and other globally renowned leaders, both Western and Eastern, for the death sentences imposed on these former military rulers to be commuted to life sentences. Mr. Rawlings would also wistfully lament the fact that these brutally and, in retrospect, gratuitously slain military rulers were not even half as corrupt as Mr. John Dramani Mahama and his Gonja Mafia and SADA Team of Northern-Descended “Nkonfem-Flying” Gravy-Train Riders.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
November 27, 2020

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