Highlights of the August 18 Abronye Press Confab – Part 2

There were quite a few highlights in the Abronye Press Conference Presentation that escaped my epistemic purview or knowledge and attention, being naturally due to the fact that yours truly has been away from Ghana for the past three-dozen years. Indeed, he was one of the very lucky relatively few Ghanaian citizens trapped by the so-called Rawlings Revolution to be able to get out of the take-no-prisoners pathway of the Jerry John Rawlings’ junta juggernaut that became known as the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), that literally dominated Ghana’s political landscape from December 31, 1981 to January 1992, or thereabouts. On the whole, the Abronye Presentation was crystal clear, simple and pointedly informative as well as instructive for even the informally tutored student of postcolonial Ghanaian history and culture.

In particular, the WAMCO story is an eyeopener, if also because it puts an undeflectable spotlight on the criminally regressive economic and labor policies of the leadership of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), especially the leadership of former President John “European Airbus Payola” Dramani Mahama, the vintage student of the J J Rawlings Revolutionary Academy, whom the late acclaimed Founding-Father of the National Democratic Congress incessantly and ruefully described as the most thoroughgoing corrupt Ghanaian leader in the post-independence era. The WAMCO Story has to do with the establishment of a state-owned Cocoa-Processing Plant or Factory, which the presser convener tells us had been established as relatively far back as 1992, about the period that marks the inception of Ghana’s Fourth Republic. WAMCO would literally and predictably collapse under the grossly irresponsible and criminally incompetent watch of President Mahama in 2014.

In the wake of the complete collapse of WAMCO which, Mr. Kwame Baffoe tells us, was at the time the only functioning cocoa-processing factory in the entire West-African Subregion, Mr. Mahama had either deliberately failed to intervene to help revive WAMCO or the extant President was simply darn too incompetent to step up to the proverbial plate and get things working again. Once again, it would take the opportune and auspicious accession of “The Little Man from Kyebi” with the Big Brain, Big Dreams and Big Ideas to step up to the plate and get WAMCO working again. Abronye DC also promptly and significantly tells us that as of the moment of his presser or press conference presentation of August 18, 2021, at least 10,000 (Ten Thousand) Ghanaian citizens and residents were actively and profitably employed by WAMCO.

He also emotionally recalls a tragic incident in which some WAMCO labor leaders returning from a fruitless aid-soliciting conference with the then-President Mahama, in a desperate bid to resuscitating WAMCO, met their own untimely deaths on the highway. This rather poignant and emotionally wrenching narrative was clearly aimed at illustrating the fact that those social activists recklessly and adamantly spearheading the #FixTheCountry Campaign Demonstrations were veritable and morally peevish and unconscionable charlatans, cynics and hypocritical rabble-rousers who had absolutely no credible national development agenda, besides opportunistically scheming for elective power so that they could, once again, kleptocratically regress and reverse the clock of our national development. Abronye also eloquently and meticulously exposed the rabble-rousing convener of the #FixTheCountry Campaign Demonstrations, Mr. Barker-Vormawor, as a highly paid Presidential Staffer in the Mahama government and could therefore one who not be seriously considered as a patriotic and politically neutral or nonpartisan activist.

At the very least, notes the Bono Regional Chairman of the ruling New Patriotic Party, the #FixTheCountry Campaign Demonstrations is headed by bona fide operatives of Ghana’s main opposition National Democratic Congress, which clearly makes this entire movement a veritable propaganda wing of the 2024 Mahama-for-President Campaign. What is even more significant to underscore here, in the well-informed opinion of Mr. Kwame Baffoe, is the imperative need and/or necessity for each and every patriotic Ghanaian citizen to, first and foremost, ask him-/herself precisely how do we get the country fixed, unless we are also willing to establish or troubleshoot the question of precisely who dismantled or criminally derailed the development agenda of the country? And true to form and character, Abronye DC does not disappoint; rather, he offers his audience a masterful rejoinder to the rabble-rousing propagandists of the Mahama-chaperoned National Democratic Congress.

Which is that nearly each and every major factory or industrial plant that collapsed in the country over the course of the last 40 years was either directly collapsed by the leadership of the Rawlings-led junta of the Provisional National Defense Council or the latter’s political and ideological progeny, to wit, the ironically named and faux-popularly elected National Democratic Congress. The irony here is that it scandalously appears that the leadership of the National Democratic Congress have arrogated unto themselves the inalienable constitutional right to thoroughly wreck the country, while they cavalierly, self-righteously and imperiously delegate the onerous and Sisyphean task of fixing or repairing the same to their main political opponents, to wit, the progressive and visionary leaders of the New Patriotic Party.

It is this “Talibanistic” or “Baboonistic” modus operandi of the Mahama Posse which the Bono Regional Chairman of the ruling party sought to deftly expose during his post-#FixTheCountry nationwide demonstrations the biggest of which took place in Accra on August 4, 2021, which day and date was just recently declared as Ghana’s Founders’ Day and a National Holiday in the memory and honor of the legendary Big Six Founding-Fathers of Modern Ghana. As of this writing, some political observers and pundits were even calling for Mr. Kwame Baffoe to be named the National Communications Director of the New Patriotic Party.

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

August 21, 2021

E-mail: [email protected]