What Professional Pride Is President Mahama Talking about Here?

It is quite obvious that the recently defeated Candidate John Dramani Mahama was ironically and farcically engaged in a desperate act of political suicide, when he accused the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) of being so vindictive that workers in the government’s employ or the public sector who were card-carrying members of the country’s main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), were deathly afraid of publicly identifying themselves with the “colors of their political party” (See “Mahama Says Professionals Fear to Show Their NDC Colors When ‘Vindictive’ NPP Is in Power” Modernghana.com 4/29/21).

Now, this is rather wickedly ironic coming from a man who, not very long ago, in the heat of his 2020 Presidential-Election Campaign, truculently warned his main political opponents, to wit, President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo and Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia, to be mindful of the fact that the Jerry John Rawlings-founded National Democratic Congress had a very proud and enviable tradition and track record of being the most violent and “revolutionarily bloody” of any political party establishment in Ghana’s postcolonial history.

The preceding warning, as I vividly recall, was made in the ancestral or geo-maternal radix of the late Chairman Jeremiah John Rawlings, the career coup-plotting architect of the double-junta reigns-of-terror that were the erstwhile Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) and the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), the immediate antecedent and ideological matriarch of the present-day Ghana’s main opposition National Democratic Congress. The geographical reference here, of course, is the “Akufo-Addo-Diminished” or more ethnically and strategically localized Volta Region. It had to take the swift and frontal or direct intervention of the executive operatives of the Ghana Peace Council (GPC) to put the former President, literally, in his place.

This is also, by the way, the same man who sternly warned any Ghanaian citizen of dire consequences, if any of the very people whose electoral mandate put him in Jubilee House casually presumed to criticize him for President Mahama’s abjectly poor management of the country’s affairs, including the perennial problem of “Dumsor.” “You are not my classmates and have never been voted President of Ghana,” the then-President Mahama fiercely warned. He also volleyed a special warning in the direction of his main and most formidable opponents in the leadup to the 2016 Presidential Election. “I have absolutely no classmates in this country. People like Nana Akufo-Addo and Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, who have never been elected to the Presidency of this country, must look at themselves and their status in our Republic before presuming to bring me down to their level. Do these two men really know how extremely difficult it is to manage the affairs of this country as President?”

If any Ghanaian citizen wants to be availed the most accurate example of arrogant political vindictiveness, the preceding quotes from the horse’s own mouth, as it were, are the most striking and perfect examples of why absolutely nobody, including the most diehard members, supporters and sympathizers of the National Democratic Congress must ever again think of putting forth the candidacy of the man that the late Chairman Jerry John Rawlings described times without number and count, as the most thoroughgoing corrupt Ghanaian politician since our beloved nation’s Independence from British colonial imperialism. It is also unforgivably absurd for Mr. Mahama to assert that “People freely identify with the NPP when NDC is in power and they don’t suffer any adverse consequences for it.”

Maybe the speaker of such abusive words ought to have directed his guff to the family members of Messrs. Peter Kenyenso and JB Danquah-Adu, and all the other dozens of hardworking and law-abiding Ghanaian citizens, of both major parties, to be certain, who lost their lives under the bloody watch of Mr. Mahama, whose deaths were never seriously investigated. Even more significantly, somebody needs to ask Candidate Mahama precisely why Mr. Samuel Ofosu-Ampofo, the most powerful operative of the National Democratic Congress, besides the former President, and the latter party’s National Chairman, stands indicted of treasonous acts before a legitimately constituted court of our Republic.

It is also interesting to note that when it comes to Mr. Sam Jonah’s rather vacuous assertion that a “Culture of Silence” has crept onto Ghana’s political landscape under the watch of the Akufo-Addo-led government of the New Patriotic Party, the first names among the firebrand academic and civil and human rights advocates that pop up are those of, first, the late Prof. Albert Adu-Boahen, the very first Presidential Candidate of the New Patriotic Party, and not even that of the late Prof. John Evans Atta-Mills, the National Democratic Congress’ operative and former NDC-sponsored President, who unconscionably colluded and collaborated with Chairman Rawlings to make Ghana a Living Hell for hundreds of thousands of Ghanaian citizens, including the immortalized Dr. Francis Mohamed Mustapha, of the Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital and West Africa’s first professionally trained Neurosurgeon.

And then, talking of Prof. PAV Ansah, late, does it even occur to any of these cynical NDC apparatchiks that this “Akyem” native of Saltpond actually belonged to the same hallowed neoliberal ideological tradition and/or camp as Prof. Adu-Boahen? A very funny world, indeed, isn’t it, Dear Reader?

*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]