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06.05.2021 Feature Article

This Time, It Is the Elephant that Swallowed Jonah

This Time, It Is the Elephant that Swallowed Jonah
06.05.2021 LISTEN

He is integral to the problems that Mr. Sam Jonah is very desperately decrying now, perhaps he has come to the sobering realization and grim conclusion, rather late in life, that whatever legacy he leaves behind may not be very significant or impactful to the life and existence of the ordinary Ghanaian citizen, besides his own family, relatives and those business associates with whom he has collaborated to filthily enrich themselves. At the world-famous Obuasi Goldfields Corporation, or rather the Asante (Ashanti) Goldfields Corporation (AGC), where he used to be the Managing-Director for most of the 1980s and, perhaps, well into the 1990s and a little beyond, there has not been any viable legacy to speak of, until very recently when President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo got the Mahama-collapsed Ashanti (Asante) Goldfields Corporation working again.

The former President of the National Democratic Congress' Looting Brigade had widely reportedly told His Royal Majesty, The Asantehene, Otumfuo Osei-Tutu, II, that any attempt to reactivate the Obuasi Gold Mines was well beyond redemption. It is quite conceivable that the decision to vitriolically, if also hypocritically, light into the Akufo-Addo-led government of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), had everything to do with the fact that the recent reactivation of the AGC may very well have badly exposed the entrepreneurial charlatan that may very well be the professional personality profile of the Cape Coast native who leveraged the Gold Mines and Reserves of Ghana in order to make himself filthy rich and then decamp or comfortably settle in South Africa in order to thievishly feed fat on the collective resources of our beloved country. Yes, Johannesburg. That is where his Jonah Capital equities firm is headquartered.

But I guess the real problem worth highlighting here is the fact that fundamentally, absolutely nothing has changed in Ghana since Mr. Jonah was named Managing-Director of the Asante (Ashanti) Goldfields Corporation. When this writer left Ghana in the midsummer of 1985, the acute problem of poor sanitation was as humongous a problem as it is presently. So, perhaps, rather than wax silly and scandalously idiotic, Mr. Jamal Konneh ought to have asked the presenter of that haughty and self-righteous Rotarian address titled “Going Down the Up Escalator: Reflections of a Senior Ghanaian Citizen,” precisely what kind and level of involvement Mr. Jonah had made in the health and sanitation sector of our country in order to facilitate the drastic reduction in the kind of filth that Mr. Konneh so flippantly and thoughtlessly supposes ought to have constituted the main thrust of Mr. Jonah's rather pedestrian attack on the Akufo-Addo Administration (See “Sam Jonah Has Swallowed the Whale, Incompetent NPP Unleashing Attack Dogs on Him for Speaking the Reality – Jamal Konneh” Modernghana.com 4/29/21).

But that the Mahama Posse chose to use Mr. Jamal Konneh, the so-called Eastern Regional Elections Director of the National Democratic Congress to play up the self-righteous presentation by the man who was once knighted by Britain's Queen Elizabeth, II, for literally filling up the gold vaults of The Crown at the criminal and damnable expense of the erstwhile Colony of the Gold Coast, present-day Ghana, that is, for the greatest possible populist effect or political capital, is all the more to be pitied. Why, for example, had an Accra-resident operative of the National Democratic Congress not been selected for this hatchet propaganda job? And why a Regional Elections Director, and not an expert Economic Development point person of the party? I have the answer right here for you, my Dear Reader: It is because as was more than amply made clear, Mr. Jonah seemed to be worried silly about what this self-proclaimed “Senior Citizen” perceived to be the precipitously dangerous downward spiral in which he deliriously envisaged the nation to be headed under the managerial direction of his obviously avowed political archnemesis, to wit, President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo.

In 1985, when I left the turbulent Rawlings-Tsikata-dominated terrain of Ghana for the United States of America, Ghana's economy was effectively and decidedly in tatters. So, Mr. Jonah would do himself and the rest of us great good to inform the Global Ghanaian Public or Community what measures he helped the Rawlings' Revolutionaries put in place to significantly improve the quality of life of the ordinary Ghanaian citizen. You see, in 1985, the Rawlings junta had embarked on the same IMF-World Bank neocolonialist agenda that Chairman Rawlings, late, claimed constituted his main objective for ousting the democratically elected Dr. Hilla “Babini” Limann-led government of the People's National Party, a putsch that was largely undertaken by low-ranked northern-descended Ghanaian soldiers at the instigation and treasonable command of the Rawlings-Tsikata Trokosi Nationalist Cabal.

It is also all too pedestrian for the Mahama Posse to use a Krobo-descended NDC operative to launch a rearguard attack on an Akan/Akyem-descended President Akufo-Addo. This rather cheap and lurid assay at ethnic baiting cannot be lost on anybody, except the most politically untutored observer of Fourth Republican Ghanaian political culture. It is also rather too emotionally and psychologically retarded for anybody with a profitable sense of time management to waste the same getting sidetracked by insignificant political gadflies and houseflies like Mr. Konneh. Ultimately, contrary to what the NDC's Mr. Konneh would have the rest of us believe, once again, not only has the Whale of Nineveh swallowed Jonah, the self-righteous Prophet of Doom, this time around, Jonah has also been swallowed and crushed by the Great Elephant of Akyem-Abuakwa.

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

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

May 2, 2021
E-mail: [email protected]

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