The Arrogance of John Mahama

As a matter of choice and the most profitable use of my time, I have not been following the decidedly Dead-On-Arrival (DOA) 2020 Presidential-Election Petition because, as I have already noted at the beginning of this very sentence, the petition was decidedly Dead-On-Arrival before it even began; plus, I would rather invest whatever precious little time I have on my hands thinking, researching and writing about the long-term sustainable development of our beloved motherland and fatherland as well, of course. The Mahama Petition was Dead-On-Arrival because the first order of business that the Justice Kwasi Anin-Yeboah-presided Supreme Court of Ghana (SCOG) had to deal with were the same kinds of mistakes that the prime loser of the 2020 Presidential Election would not have Mrs. Jean Adukwei Mensa make. Mrs. Mensa is, of course, the genius and inimitably efficient Chairperson of Ghana’s Independent Electoral Commission (IEC).

Actually, they are not the same mistakes; I am just referring to the question of human fallibility or susceptibility of the human personality to unavoidably make mistakes incurably or without cease. And, especially, the rectification of the same without materially or significantly impacting the substance of that which needs or needed to be rectified or the ultimate rectification of the same. In other words, it was rather amusing that while the plaintiff of the 2020 Presidential-Election Petition, that is, Mr. John “SADA-Nkonfem” Dramani Mahama, would not suffer or tolerate the decision by the IEC’s Chairperson to correct mistakes made in the initial declaration of the results of the 2020 Presidential Election, nevertheless, the nauseatingly self-righteous plaintiff found it to be perfectly normal, and even the most rightful and needful thing to do, for the Supreme Court to permit him and his lawyers to correct mistakes that the plaintiff and his lawyers made in the very fundamental and elementary process of filing their petition.

Now, the man who has not missed the least opportunity to publicly thumb his nose at the country’s judicial system and, in particular, the Supreme Court, wants his petition to be halted because proceedings do not appear to be going his way. In the main, the Mahama Posse would have the Apex Court’s adjudication panel pose some questions, about a dozen in all, that the plaintiff and his lawyers want Mrs. Mensa and her staff of Election Administrators to answer, but which the Supreme Jurists find to be patently irrelevant and a distraction from the main thrust of the petition. What is interesting to observe here is the argument by the plaintiff and his counsel, composed of a dozen, or so, lawyers, that the Supreme Jurists have a bounden obligation to review their own decision not to allow the so-called interrogatives to be made because, somehow, in the opinion of the plaintiff and his counsel, Justice Anin-Yeboah and his crackerjack Associates of the Supreme Court of Ghana have absolutely no idea of what they are talking about.

This peevish streak of arrogance is not the least bit surprising because in the recent past, the former President has categorically and publicly stated that he has absolutely no peers or classmates among the global Ghanaian citizenry and community because other than the Presidents John Evans Atta-Mills, Jerry John Rawlings and Mr. John Agyekum-Kufuor, the lone surviving former Fourth-Republican President, that is, other than Mr. Mahama, none of the members of the Ghanaian electorate has/have ever succeeded or acceded to the Presidency. Now, it goes without saying that the plaintiff of the 2020 Presidential-Election Petition considers the members of the Supreme Court of Ghana to be equally underqualified to presume to adjudicate his petition suit. If the foregoing observation has validity, then one wonders why Mr. Mahama decided to take his grievance to a court of whose membership he is globally infamous for not having any modicum of great regard or respect for.

Not to speak of the inglorious fact that Mr. Mahama is the only President in postcolonial Ghanaian history who has used publicly paid, but unaccounted for, private detectives to conduct a sting operation against the members of the judiciary, under the dubious pretext and guise of rooting out official corruption, at the same time that he has personally been caught up in at least a half-dozen incidents of international anticorruption dragnets. There is also something inescapably cynical about the putatively frigid relationship between former President Mahama, a notorious scofflaw who once rode roughshod over a Supreme Court verdict to spring some violent convicted media propagandists in the pay of the National Democratic Congress, in what became known as the Montie Three/ Montie Trio cause célèbre from the Nsawam Medium-Security Prison, where these thugs had been sentenced to serve four months each.

In all likelihood, the overriding objective of the plaintiff of the 2020 Presidential-Election Petition was to size up the impact that his deliberate, perennial and systematic attempt to thoroughly destroy the credibility of Ghana’s judicial system and establishment may have had on the same. Now, we all know that drama, summary dismissals and all, the former Vice-President who could not inform the nation about the precise cause of the abrupt “in-office” death of his immediate boss, to wit, President John Evans Atta-Mills, completely failed in his dastardly attempt emasculate and discredit the membership of Ghana’s judicial establishment.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

January 22, 2021

E-mail: [email protected]