It Is Not About Debts, It Is About Achievements, Stupid!

As was all to be expected, the payola-addicted former President of the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana took his vacuous and morally and intellectually bankrupt and downright insulting “Thank-You Tour” to the political and electoral stronghold of President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo in the Eastern Region, where the twice seismically defeated former President John Dramani Mahama told his largely amused and absent-minded audience that the National Democratic Congress (NDC), the political party that he has led to two crushing defeats at the polls, was still the only political party that was capable of steering Ghana out of what the most grossly incompetent postcolonial Ghanaian leader, in the evergreen and unimpeachable words of the late President Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings, termed as “its current economic woes which have seen the Cedi [the country’s local currency] spiral precipitously downward against major foreign currencies like the dollar” (See “Under Akufo-Addo Every Ghanaian Owes GHȻ 11,000 – Mahama Alleges” Ghanaweb.com 10/14/21).

He was in the wrong region at the wrong time because exactly one week before his sham “Thank-You Tour” of the Eastern Region, the Cedi was being ranked as the Number-Three Strongest Monetary Currency on the African Continent, just behind the Dinar currencies of Libya and Tunisia, with the currencies of all the other oil-rich countries on the continent, such as Nigeria, Angola and Sudan, far well behind and down under. You see, the most pointed and appropriate response to have volleyed at Kwame Gonja ought to have about the value ranking of the Cedi while the Bole-Bamboi, Akufo-Addo-created Savannah Region, native was comfortably and callously holed up the Golden Stool’s architectural edifice of Jubilee House. There is a great chance that the Tamale Secondary School graduate would not have been able to give the right answer to any questioner.

Now, Kwame Gonja says that while he was President an unnamed relative of President Akufo-Addo had publicly stated that if the country’s debt stock were to be divvied up among all Ghanaian citizens, each and every one of us would owe and have to pay our creditors at least GHȻ 4,700. Now, let us charitably factor in inflation by rounding up the latter figure up to GHȻ 5,000, fully well knowing that it was actually far more than even the latter figure under the Mahama Presidency, when one also factors in the blistering economic ravages of “Dumsor,” both internally and externally. As well, let us add up the excess of some 200,000 lumpen poor but intellectually and academically able-bodied Ghanaian youths bereft of ready access to the present Akufo-Addo-implemented Fee-Free Senior High School System, and it begins to become limpidly obvious that even at a debt-stock per capita of GHȻ 11,000, the Akufo-Addo Administration is light years ahead of its immediate predecessor when it comes to questions of administrative competence and the general management of Ghana’s economy.

As well, when he vacuously and self-righteously pontificates about the state of national insecurity, the 2020 Presidential Candidate of the National Democratic Congress must be promptly reminded of the fact that it is the National Chairman of his own party, namely, Mr. Samuel Ofosu-Ampofo, widely regarded as Kwame Gonja’s right-hand man, who stands indicted in the case of the kidnapping of the three young Canadian white women NGO volunteers that caught global media attention some two years ago, and not the National Chairman of the ruling New Patriotic Party or any key operative of the New Patriotic Party, for that matter. We must also not forget the covert and dastard attempt by the then-President Mahama to establish a colony of Muslim-Arab Terrorists in the country. Indeed, but for the diplomatic genius and visionary foresight of the then newly elected President Akufo-Addo, Ghana would already have become a fierce battleground of Jihadist terror, in much the same manner as the Boko Haram of Nigeria, Mali, Algeria, Chad and elsewhere in the West-African Subregion.

Then also, who has soon forgotten the dastardly attempt by the then-President Mahama, in the leadup to the 2016 General Election, to stick Ghanaians with a Judgment-Debt tab of $ 4.6 Billion (USD), under the specious guise of MoMo interinstitutional banking transactional operability or interoperability. Once again, but for the sleuthing genius of some Bank of Ghana technocrats, led by Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia, the Mahama Posse would have literally sold Ghana down the Slave River in a heinously bogus transactional criminality that would have made the Alfred Agbesi Woyome Mega-Heist seem like chum change, in New York City parlance. Thanks to Vice-President Bawumia and his crackerjack team of first-rate patriotic Ghanaian technocrats, to hear Mr. Paul Adom-Otchere eloquently and meticulously tell it, the same inter-banking institutional transactional and “revolutionary” interoperability program would cost Ghana the relatively diddly sum of $ 2.5 Million.

Now, this unconscionable kleptocrat and nation-wrecker would have Ghanaian voters believe that he is the best thing that happened to their country since the “auspiciously inscrutable” liquidation of President John Evans Atta-Mills by “Divine Providence.” Inshallah!

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

October 15, 2021

E-mail: [email protected]