What “Prophecy” Is Kate Gyamfuah Talking About?

Her nation-wrecking participation in Galamsey, the environmentally predatory and destructive illegal, small-scale mining activities is far more telling of the abysmal near-future destiny of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) than any prophecy that crooked and greedy politicians like the National Women’s Organizer of the latter party, short of sheer miracle, could hope for by way of the latter party’s near-certain return to the gray margins of opposition political culture over the course of the next 60 years, and not the diddly 30 years that Ms. Kate Abena Gyamfuah claims to have been prophesied, that is, in the event of the presently ruling party’s failure to break the jinxy 8-year alternating tenures that well appears to have become the established norm between the country’s two major political parties, namely, the New Patriotic Party and the main opposition National Democratic Congress (See “Prophecy Says Failure to ‘Break the 8’ Is Equal [to] 30 Years of Opposition – NPP’s Kate Gyamfuah” Modernghana.com 7/11/22).

From the dismal look of things, thus far, Ms. Gyamfuah, at least a dozen of whose Galamsey Changfang Chinese-made excavators were reported to have either been conflagrated or confiscated by the government’s watchdog team in the heavily polluted bed of the Birem Riverbed, is set to be returned to her post as the National Women’s Organizer of the New Patriotic Party, largely for the same reasons that a remarkable majority of her reprobate colleagues among the executive ranks of the party are certain to be returned to their various boondoggle positions at the party’s Kokomlemle Headquarters. And the reason, of course, is inescapably because fundamentally speaking, there is absolutely no difference in caliber between the kleptocratic leadership of the main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the ruling New Patriotic Party.

You see, Dear Reader, in the six years that the Akufo-Addo-led government of the New Patriotic Party has held the democratic reins of governance, the NPP leadership has scandalously demonstrated that it is as kleptocratically self-serving as the previous Mills-Mahama tandem regimes of the National Democratic Congress. Now, what this latter statement simply means is that the leadership of the New Patriotic Party desperately kicked and screamed to be ceded the democratic reins of governance so that, in retrospect, they could also be granted equal opportunity to plunder and pillage our National Treasury, just as the Issahaku Group had done with the digitization program at the Bank of Ghana under the watch of former President John “Akonfem-Kanazoe Ouagadougou” Dramani Mahama.

Well, actually, the New Patriotic Party leadership did much better under the far more fiscally responsible leadership of Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia, himself a former Deputy-Governor of the Bank of Ghana. The problem appears to have gotten worse under the stewardship of Finance Minister Kenneth K. Ofori-Atta, and Mr. Charles Adu-Boahen, CEO of Black Star Advisors (BSA) and Deputy Finance Minister, both of whom have been accused of an egregious and flagrant conflict-of-interest breaches by having companies privately owned by these two cabinet appointees selected, noncompetitively, as investment-loan advisors for the Akufo-Addo government and, in effect, the Ghanaian taxpayer at humongous advisory services fees.

In the case of Mr. Ofori-Atta, the conflict-of-interest violation is alleged to have arisen primarily out of having the Finance Minister’s Databank Investment Group, which he cofounded with some two other extant partners, serve as investment advisors for the government at exorbitant advisory and commission fees. But that Ghana’s Parliament would cavalierly consent to such patently untenable business arrangements or practices, a situation that would not be tolerated in any robust and healthily functioning democratic political culture, is all the more disturbing. In all likelihood, the Finance Minister and his deputy acted on precedents set by previous National Democratic Congress regimes. And this is precisely where it gets even more inexcusably troublesome, because the moral pretext upon which the leadership of the New Patriotic Party coasted through two electoral victories was that the leadership of the NPP was far less corrupt, sacrificial and progressively oriented towards the massive creation of social-intervention programs, precisely the kind of national development strategy and agenda direly needed by the country and Ghanaians at this time.

So far, relatively speaking, the Akufo-Addo government stands head-and-shoulders over and above all Fourth-Republican governments. It is in the equally critical area of official corruption that much more deserves to be done on the part of the present government. In short, this is where President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo truly needs to demonstrate that, indeed, he stands in a class all by himself, when it comes to the admittedly uphill battle against official corruption. Thus far, the prognosis does not seem to be the least bit encouraging. Even more significant is the urgent need for somebody more levelheaded to take the likes of the New Patriotic Party’s National Women’s Organizer back to school and thoroughly reeducate Ms. Kate Abena Gyamfuah on the incontestable fact that whether the New Patriotic Party gets to stay in power post-Nana Akufo-Addo or not, primarily and squarely depends on the collective performance of the party’s leadership, including the National Women’s Organizer, of course, and not the sort of scandalously no-brainer “prophecies” that Ms. Gyamfuah seems to be so morbidly and pathologically, if also obtusely, fixated upon.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

July 11, 2022

E-mail: okoampaahoofekwame@gmail.com

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