It was his fifth delivery as substantive President of the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana; and you bet, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo did not disappoint, if also because it was the one most original of his scores of addresses that did not lapse into plagiaristic platitudes of the kind that had in the past inadvisably and unnecessarily drowned out whatever memorable and instructive message he had for both the global Ghanaian community and the greater international community at large, and also found his most ardent and inveterate political opponents having a field day attacking the personality and the integrity of the man. Every puzzle seems to have fallen perfectly into place as it surely ought and had to. But, for me, personally, and I hope for the overwhelming majority of Ghanaian citizens as well, what stood out the most was the yeomanly efforts employed by the Government to alleviate the COVID-19 Global Pandemic; in the main, the approximately 10-million people who, we are told, benefited from electricity and water subsidies. Now, that amounts to roughly a third of the total population of Ghana.
I kept wondering how many Ghanaians had benefited from such utility subsidies under the four-and-half-year Dumsor-inflected tenure of the previous Mahama regime. Of course, the correct answer is “Zilch!” And yet, the former Presidential Remedial or Developmental-Level Student Practitioner and pathological payola addict, by his own admission, by the way, would have Ghanaian voters return him to power come 2024. Actually, Kwame Gonja Ouagadougou Akonfem-Kanazoe has deceived himself into believing that he won the 2020 Presidential Election, which an incumbent President Akufo-Addo handily won by a whopping half-million (500,000) of the legitimate votes cast. Maybe somebody ought to ask the Akufo-Addo-created Savannah Region native, why he had abruptly abandoned his electioneering campaign and, reliable legend has it, resorted to bribing disaffected parliamentary candidates on the ticket of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP). And boy, did he nearly succeed in literally railroading the man who beat him soundly like his own son! Could any insult to the human intelligence and the common sense of Ghanaians be worse or more insulting?
As well, we are informed that approximately GHȻ 18 Billion, which translates into 5 percent of the country's Gross Domestic Product (GDP), was spent on containing the Coronavirus Pandemic. Here, again, I wondered how much the Mahama regime had spent in 2014, or thereabouts, to contain the very low-level cholera epidemic that hit parts of the country and resulted in the clearly avoidable deaths of about a dozen students at the University of Cape Coast, Ghana’s flagship academy for the training of teachers and educators, and elsewhere around the country. You see, these are some of the things that I would advise those of our citizens who really care about both the present and future development of our beloved country to think seriously about, even as we steadily head into the 2024 watershed General Election season. Nana Akufo-Addo also highlighted what may be aptly termed as The Putin-Ukrainian Factor and the catastrophic bite at the fuel pump and the global market at large that the latter fit of deadly violence is having. He did not go there directly, as Americans are wont to say, but the President definitely and unmistakably implied that the global scope of what is presently happening on the heels of the remarkable recession of the COVID-19 Pandemic never occurred under 16 years of National Democratic Congress’ leadership in Fourth-Republican Ghana.
Yet, even as Dr. Nii Moi Thompson, the renowned Ghanaian economist and former Director-General of the National Development Planning Commission (NDPC), recently pointed out in a very instructive and perceptive article that was widely published by the Ghanaian media, on the whole, when they have wielded the reins of democratic governance, the leadership of the New Patriotic Party has held inflation nearly twice as well as or better than their kleptocratic counterparts of the National Democratic Congress whose monarchical and dynastic kingpin, namely, former President John Dramani Mahama, was perennially and incessantly described by Chairman Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings, the globally acclaimed Founding-Father of the National Democratic Congress, as the most thoroughgoing corrupt postcolonial Ghanaian leader.
But, of course, such brutally frank and objective characterization of his former protégé or mentee does not absolutely in any way exonerate the late Maximum Military Dictator, later suavely and opportunistically turned democratically elected leader, from the inescapable blame of the responsibility of having criminally and effectively run Ghana’s economy aground, with the collusive and conspiratorial and collaborative complicity of Prof. Kwesi Botchwey, Ghana’s longest-reigning Finance and Economic Planning Minister, with the specially solicited supervisory assistance of the twin Bretton-Woods establishment of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and The World – or the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD). At any rate, to hear it from the proverbial horse’s own mouth, actually from the witty pen and epistemic acumen of Dr. Thompson, when the New Patriotic Party’s leadership has held the reins of democratic governance, inflation has been held at 40 percent, compared to 70 percent under the tenure and leadership of the National Democratic Congress.
I strongly suspect that the timeline here ranges between 2000 and 2016, when the John Agyekum-Kufuor-led government of the New Patriotic Party and the late John Evans Atta-Mills-led regime of the National Democratic Congress, respectively and literally ruled the proverbial roost. Nana Akufo-Addo also highlighted the acute and abject lack of any remarkable level of development in Ghana’s health sector under 20 years of the late Chairman Jerry John Rawlings-led junta of the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), the immediate and direct political and institutional antecedent of the present institutional apparatus and establishment of the Rawlings-founded National Democratic Congress, both of which political and institutional establishments did little to absolutely nothing to significantly improve the size and quality of Ghana’s health system.
To give Ghanaians a clear and more than a passing or glancing appreciation of the seismic impact of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin’s brutal unilateral expansionist war on The Ukraine, Nana Akufo-Addo pointedly highlighted the fact that the era of globalization has determined the inextricable interlinkage between the economies of Ghana, on the one hand, and The Ukraine and Russia, on the other, in ways that could not have been readily fathomed barely two generations ago. To the preceding effect, Nana Akufo-Addo had the following very critical socioeconomic and political observation to make: “The terrible events in [The] Ukraine have a direct impact on our lives here in Ghana…. Thirty percent (30 %) of our wheat flour and fertilizer imports come from Russia. Sixty percent (60 %) of iron rods and other metal sheets are imported from [The] Ukraine, and almost twenty percent (20 %) of Ghana’s manganese is shipped to [The] Ukraine.” Ironically, this aspect of President Akufo-Addo’s 2022 State of the Nation presentation may very well be the most significant commercial and/or economic knowledge disseminated to the non-intellectual and professionally non-specialist Ghanaian citizens about the practically and decidedly organic interlinkage of the present global economy.
Of course, historically, the greatest commodity that literally kickstarted the present global economic system was the massive chattel enslavement of African humanity in the modern era, roughly dating from the middle of the fifteenth century or the 1450s. Thus, it contextually begins to make a lot of sense, perfect sense, that is, when Nana Akufo-Addo homes in on his preceding instructive illustration of the inextricable global socioeconomic, political and cultural interlinkage by further observing as follows: “The bombs might [may?] be dropping on cities half a world away[,] but they are hitting our pockets [hard right] here in Ghana. Even so, we have managed to ensure that fuel supplies have not been disrupted, unlike several other parts of the world.”
On the so-called Agenda 111 Hospitals and Healthcare Facilities Project, the President attributed the seemingly overambitious nature of this electioneering campaign promise to one that was directly inspired by the callous, deliberate and systematic neglect and destruction of Ghana’s seminal infrastructural foundation, largely laid down or constructed by President Kwame Nkrumah and his Convention People’s Party (CPP) government, but criminally and thoroughly dismantled by the Rawlings-led “devolutionary” junta of the Provisional National Defense Council, whose leadership of the nominally redesignated National Democratic Congress (NDC) continues to kick and scream, literally at the top of their lungs, to be allowed by the longsuffering Ghanaian electorate to return to Jubilee House, so that they could, once again, recklessly proceed to thoroughly dismantle whatever intellectual, technological, industrial and economic gains may have been made, against daunting and epic odds, by the Agyekum-Kufuor- and Akufo-Addo-led governments of the New Patriotic Party.
Of course, we can also not honestly and objectively discount the remarkable contribution, largely in the form of the equally infantile, nihilistic and regressive party infighting and virulent personality squabbles that unarguably facilitated the skin-of-teeth victory and accession to power of the Atta-Mills-led government of the National Democratic Congress, that precipitated the wanton bilking of the criminally exploited Ghanaian taxpayer in what globally and infamously became known as THE WOYOME MEGA-HEIST. Vis-à-vis which, by the way, a newly elected and visibly terminally ill President Mills held a major nose-thumbing press conference in Accra, and while holding the upraised hand of the Chief Architect of the Woyome Mega-Heist, namely, Mr. Alfred Agbesi Woyome, boxing-champion fashion, imperiously informed Ghanaians that the widely touted foremost National Democratic Congress’ financier and underwriter owed us and our beloved country absolutely nothing! And that if anything at all, it was rather us, the Ghanaian people, who owed Mr. Woyome profound and massive waves apologies and an unquenchable debt of gratitude.
*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr
By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
April 10, 2022
E-mail: [email protected]
We’ll no longer tolerate your empty, unwarranted attacks – TUC blasts Prof Adei
Bawumia donates GHc200,000 to support Madina fire victims
IMF to disburse US$360million third tranche to Ghana without creditors MoU
Truck owner share insights into train collision incident
Paramount chief of Bassare Traditional Area passes on
Two teachers in court over alleged illegal possession of BECE papers
Sunyani: Victim allegedly shot by traditional warriors appeals for justice
Mahama vows to scrap teacher licensure exams, review Free SHS policy
Government will replace burnt Madina shops with a new three-story, 120-store fac...
