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06.05.2021 Feature Article

Akufo-Addo Quenched Dumsor for Four Years, Be Grateful!

Akufo-Addo Quenched Dumsor for Four Years, Be Grateful!
06.05.2021 LISTEN

She should have committed suicide under the watch of Ghana's most fiscally and managerially irresponsible Fourth-Republican President, when Dumsor collapsed more than half of all privately owned Ghanaian businesses. Instead, Margaret Ansei, the Mahama-appointed former Municipal Chief Executive Officer (MCE) for Suhum, in the Akuapem-South Constituency – actually Suhum is the ancestral and historical homeland of Akyem-Apedwa “Agyapaed” by our foresight-lacking forebears – has the chutzpah to assert that she is embarrassed to be a Ghanaian. That goes to show the Dear Reader how politically laced and tinged the mindset and temperament of the operatives of the country's main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) are wired (See “Dumsor: I Regret Being a Ghanaian – Former Mahama Spokeswoman” MyXyzOnline.com 4/15/21).

Then, there is also this laughable aspect of hyperbolical exhibition of wanton and lurid hypocrisy in Margaret Ansei “Magoo's” sophistry that says that since President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo once said that his immediate predecessor, that is, former President John “Akonfem-Kanazoe” Dramani Mahama, had left behind excess power that was more than enough to light up each and every home and business place or space in the country and, perhaps, even the entire West-African Subregion, Nana Akufo-Addo ought to be roundly condemned for continuing to preside over the clearly preventable scourge of Dumsor. And, oh, it is also rather pathetic that for the leadership of a political party that dirtily and fiercely fought to be returned to Jubilee House, or the Presidency, in the 2020 General Election, it had to take Nana Akufo-Addo's appointed Mr. John Peter Amewu to alert the general Ghanaian public to the fact that the country needed an energy expansion capacity of at least 250 megawatts to stay uninterruptedly lighted all 24 hours in a day.

So, what did the Mahama Posse intend to do with our power-supply crisis, once in power, since they did not even know the quantity of voltage capacity that Ghanaians needed to stay unerratically and uninterruptedly lighted throughout the day, the week, month and the year? The obvious point that I am trying to make here, of course, is that for party-machine operatives who have absolutely no clue about how to manage the energy resources of the country, for the equitable benefit of all its citizens, political talkatives like Margaret Ansei Magoo and Afrifa Yamoah-Ponkoh scream too much and too horrendously loudly for comfort. But what is even more important for the overwhelming majority of the members of the general public to note, is the fact that these two shamelessly unelected and clearly unelectable Mahama bandwagon politicians have absolutely no credibility, whatsoever, to so glibly and cavalierly presume to damn the Akufo-Addo Administration for the management of a vital sector of our national economy that the present New Patriotic Party government has handled light years better than their counterparts among the ranks of the Mahama-led regime of the National Democratic Congress.

Yes, there is certainly an unsavory level of the scourge of Dumsor still prevalent in the country. But even as the newly appointed Energy Minister, Dr. Matthew Opoku-Prempeh, reminded the nation a couple, or so, weeks ago, as of this writing, the Dumsor of today does not compare anywhere near the Stygian darkness that reigned and palled the land for some four-and-half years under the watch of former President John Dramani Mahama, who preferred to criminally lavish our country's fiscal resources on his platoons of mistresses, paramours and girlfriends. It is also strategically absolutely not for nothing that both the former Mahama Deputy Presidential Campaign Spokeswoman, to wit, Ms. Margaret Ansei Magoo, and Mr. Yamoah-Ponkoh, the former Edweso (Ejisu)-Juaben (Dwaben) Municipal Chief Executive Officer, have both taken to harping on the fact that the Asante Region and the Greater-Accra Region are the hardest hit by the scourge of Dumsor.

We all know that the Asante Region is the hermetic stronghold of the ruling New Patriotic Party, and that the Gonja-born Mr. Mahama virulently and publicly loves to hate and shame the Asante for being wisely niggardly with their ballot, when it comes to deciding on the most appropriate choice of leadership for the country. And then, of course, the Greater-Accra Region is the second most populous region in the country and a fiercely contested electoral terrain for both major political parties and establishments. At any rate, what we really need presently, contrary to what the National Democratic Congress' political-machine operatives would have the rest of us believe, is not a timetable or schedule for the definitive resolution of Dumsor. Actually, these NDC apparatchiks simply want a pedestrian power-distribution schedule. But what is clearly needed and the pet preference of Nana Akufo-Addo is the proverbial grabbing of the bull by its horns, that is, the prompt and radical eradication of Dumsor.

You see, for Mr. Mahama, a Dumsor schedule was simply a matter of going with the flow, that is, doing absolutely nothing about the prompt and timely rectification of the problem but instead, “creatively working around” the status quo. Call it veritable stasis or do-nothing in toto. That was the National Anthem of the previous Mahama regime.

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

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

April 18, 2021
E-mail: [email protected]

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