Gbede Cannot Write but He Makes a Great Point

Japhet Festus Gbede, the National Communications Director of the country’s main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), is a young man whose heart may very well be in the right place, that is, with the pathological robber barons of the late Chairman Jerry John Rawlings’ political toy machine. But, of course, he is grossly misguided to believe that Mr. John Dramani Mahama, the European Airbus Payola-Guzzling former President of the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana, is destined to take Ghanaian citizens and voters, once more, for a ride and to the cleaners, as New Yorkers are wont to say (See “Suspended Former Chairman of Ayawaso Constituency Is a Mole Who Merits Expulsion – Pro NDC Group Demands” Modernghana.com 4/10/21).

I cannot blame Mr. Gbede for wanting Little Dramani back at the helm of our national affairs, because this young man can barely write a grammatical sentence and definitely never learned the basic rules governing the proper use of punctuations, particularly the use of the comma in basic sentence composition. I cannot blame him because it is precisely this sort of youth, with extremely poor communication skills on whose behalf the then-President Mahama fiercely fought against the advocacy and implementation of the fee-free Senior High School Policy Initiative by the then-Candidate Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo in the runup to the 2016 Presidential Election.

Mr. Gbede wants Mr. Ade Coker, the Greater-Accra Regional Chairman of the National Democratic Congress, to cease and desist from flirting with any intention of having the indefinitely suspended Ayawaso-North Chairman of the party restored to his former post. According to Mr. Gbede, the suspended Ayawaso-North’s NDC Chairman, Mr. Tahiru (Baba) Ahmed, was booted onto the margins of the party’s leadership because he had proven himself to be a mole who rather preferred to serve the interests of the operatives of the New Patriotic Party. Also, that Mr. Tahim Ahmed had, by his actions and inactions, significantly contributed to the massive success of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) in the Ayawaso-North Constituency, I suppose, in the 2020 General Election. Well, that is a judgment and a conviction that falls well outside the purview of this column and so will be left at just that.

What intrigues yours truly about Mr. Gbede’s call for the indefinite suspension of Chairman Tahiru Ahmed to remain smack and steely in place, is the plaintiff’s vehement accusation of his party’s leaders of what the young critic characterizes as the outrageous attempt by the likes of Mr. Ade Coker to “copy the lawlessness that always perpetuate[sic] in the ruling New Patriotic Party.” I suppose what Mr. Gbede meant to say here is “prevails,” that is, “the lawlessness that prevails in the New Patriotic Party.” He is, of course, indisputably accurate in his contention regarding the seemingly eternal prevalence of lawlessness in the ruling New Patriotic Party of the sort that made both the late President John Evans Atta-Mills and the latter’s arch-lieutenant, Mr. John Dramani Mahama, succeed at the Presidency.

But, of course, it is also amusingly and, perhaps, even embarrassingly obvious that Mr. Gbede had missed many of the most striking comments and remarks that the Founding-Father of his own party, the late former President Jerry John Rawlings, had to say about Mr. Gbede’s so-called President-in-Waiting, including the irreparably damning description of Mr. Mahama as the most corrupt politician ever to have succeeded to the Presidency in postcolonial Ghana. Then also, the National Communications Director of the Young Democrats would have also heard Chairman Rawlings say that he rued having created unconscionable political monsters and pathological thieves like Mr. Rawlings’ own former Communications Minister.

It also goes without saying that when he bitterly speaks to the politically crippling lawlessness of the key operatives of the New Patriotic Party, one can readily understand Mr. Gbede to be unmistakably alluding to the recent acute bout of madness that appeared to have epileptically taken grips of some self-infatuated and self-proclaimed “Elders” of the New Patriotic Party, in the wake of the Parliamentary Majority Leader’s well-considered observation that it was about time a non-Akan-descended party and government leader was chosen to succeed a lame-duck President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, the man whose well-timed presidential ambitions and intentions had been fiercely fought off by the extant outgoing party leader because the canonized myth, somehow, was that Nana Akufo-Addo’s blood was Akanistically not purebred enough. In the present context, however, Mr. Osei Kyei Mensah-Bonsu, the New Patriotic Party’s Parliamentary Majority Leader, must have been referring to Alhaji-Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, the indefatigable, visionary and progressive-thinking Vice-President of the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

April 10, 2021

E-mail: [email protected]