Atta-Mills Looted Ghana Raw with Woyome and Kwame Gonja

It is rather laughable that the globally renowned propaganda mouthpiece of Ghana’s main opposition political party, the National Democratic Congress (NDC), that is, the Ghanaweb.com media portal, would be using the name of one the country’s most thoroughgoing corrupt and thievish Fourth-Republican Presidents, namely, Prof. John Evans Atta-Mills, to morally grandstand and vacuously and shamelessly pooh-pooh the NDC’s unarguable moral and ideological superior, namely, the Akufo-Addo-led ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP). Needless to say, there is absolutely nothing “blessed” or morally and materially “beneficent” about the memory of the first Fourth-Republican President of Ghana to have “mysteriously” perished in office, an unignorably seismic event that the late President’s own Arch-Lieutenant and official second-in-command, the then-Vice-President John Dramani Mahama, euphorically described as an opportune moment that had been preordained by Divine Providence “in His inscrutable wisdom.”

Now, in the wake of revelation that several parcels of prime land integral to the Achimota Forest Reserve, in the Greater-Accra Metropolitan Area, had appeared in the terminal testament or the last will of the late Chief Executive Officer of the Ghana Forestry Commission (GFC), Mr. Kwadwo Owusu-Afriyie – aka Sir John – as having been bequeathed by the latter to some of his relatives and close associates, the Dutch-owned Ghanaweb.com media portal has published an article offensively holding up the name, image and the reputation of the late President Mills as a morally exemplary leader who once warned Ghanaian voters against the capitalist kleptocratic proclivities of the key operatives of the New Patriotic Party (See “ ‘Each Man for Himself, God for the Select Few’ – How Atta Mills Described NPP’s ‘Property[-]Owning Democracy” Ghanaweb.com 5/24/22).

This is rather absurd and insulting to the intelligence of Ghanaian voters and the citizenry at large, especially when one also reckons the fact that it was the late President Mills who, as one of his first orders of official business, held up the right hand of Mr. Alfred Agbesi Woyome, publicly and in boxing-champion fashion, and shameless and pontifically declared that the man who had used false pretenses to fraudulently bilk the Ghanaian taxpayer to the humongous tune of GHȻ 51.2 million, had done absolutely nothing wrong or illegal; and that rather than roundly condemn this Mega-Thief and foremost financier of the National Democratic Congress, Mr. Woyome needed to be rather heartily celebrated for making Ghana a country worth inhabiting.

Well, as we all are well aware of presently, the Supreme Court of Ghana (SCOG) would shortly expose the thievish shenanigans of President Mills, a principal beneficiary of the hitherto unprecedented Woyome Loot, and the rest of the vanguard hoodlum pack of the entire leadership of the National Democratic Congress. This is the memory that most patriotic and civically responsible Ghanaian citizens and residents who care about the development and prosperity of their country painfully carry with them about the Presidency of the former University of Ghana’s Tax-Law Professor. Even if one hypothetically accepts the so-called tagline of the ruling New Patriotic Party as “a property-owning democracy,” the incontrovertible fact still remains that the main national-development agenda of Ghana’s main opposition National Democratic Congress can be aptly summed up as “The Property-Looting Social Democracy.”

Ironically but unsurprisingly, it is the political establishment of the “Property-Owning” New Patriotic Party that has been solely and uniquely responsible for putting in place such socioeconomically indispensable poor-people-oriented social-intervention programs as the School-Feeding Program, the Fee-Free Senior High School Policy Initiative or System, LEAP – Financial Assistance for the Elderly, Most Vulnerable and Destitute – and, of course, the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), which the previous tandem regimes of the National Democratic Congress effectively defunded and completely bankrupted, but for the timely intervention of the newly elected Akufo-Addo-led government of the New Patriotic Party, which would promptly resuscitate the same.

You see, Dear Reader, the rather pathetic and pitiful problem with the leadership and paid shills of the National Democratic Congress is that these self-righteous “Revolutionary Politicians” have convinced themselves that they stand well over and above all the laws of the land, and that the leadership of the pathologically kleptocratic National Democratic Congress has a bounden obligation and an inalienable right to loot and empty the coffers of our National Treasury with impunity and reckless abandon. That was what the open season and open-sesame regime of the infamous Judgment-Debt hemorrhaging of the monetary and fiscal resources of Ghana, with the curiously docile and criminal complicity of some highly placed members of the judicial system and establishment, was incontestably about. That is, until President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo put a definitive and permanent end to this morally and socioeconomically inexcusable “Property-Looting Culture” of the Mills-Mahama Posse.

Ironically, even when then-President Mahama self-righteously and hypocritically sicced/sicked Mr. Anas Aremeyaw Anas and his Tiger-Eye PI gang of mercenary thugs on the members of the judiciary, Kwame Gonja Akonfem-Kanazoe Ouagadougou Dramani Mahama jealously ensured that the Judgment-Debt Gravy Train would not be decommissioned or halted anytime soon. This is what all critically thinking patriotic Ghanaian citizens ought to be talking about, and not the totally red-herring fact of whether any portions of the Achimota Forest Reserve which, by the way, the leaders of the National Democratic Congress were the very first to breach, have appeared in the last testament or will of the late former General-Secretary of the New Patriotic Party.

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

May 24, 2022

E-mail: [email protected]