Are There No Sensible People Among the Membership of the Mills’ Clan?

In reality, the question that Mr. Samuel Atta Mills, the National Democratic Congress’ Member of Parliament for the Komenda-Edina-Eguafo-Abirem (KEEA) Constituency, in the Central Region, and the widely alleged blood relative or kinsman of the late President John Evans Atta-Mills ought to be asking both of himself and his inveterate political rivals and opponents, is the glaring fact of the disturbingly apparent lack of any native intelligence-endowed members of the family and/or clan of the late retired Associate Professor of Taxation Law at the country’s flagship tertiary academy, the University of Ghana. I mean, here we are confronted with the raw and unusual set of circumstances clearly pointing to the fact of their most famous and distinguished kinsman’s seismic passing having all the inescapable markings of foul play.

And yet, brazen political opportunists like the Komenda-Edina-Eguafo-Abirem’s National Democratic Congress-sponsored Member of Parliament would have Ghanaians believe that President Mills expired under perfectly normal circumstances, even in the wake of the unignorably suspicious declaration by the dead man’s own Arch-Lieutenant, to wit, then Vice-President John “European Airbus Payola” Dramani Mahama, that it was Divine Providence, in His inscrutable wisdom, who had deemed it to be temporally perfect or most appropriate to liquidate his immediate boss, for the apparently express purpose of making Yagbonwura Kwame Gonja the first postcolonial-born Ghanaian leader.

Now, one begins to wonder whether the socioeconomic wellbeing of the Ghanaian citizenry has any place, at all, in the thinking and the mindset of an “inscrutable” Divine Providence who well appears to be far more concerned with the fact of which of his earthling creatures gets to be named as the very first postcolonial-born Ghanaian leader, rather than the far more significant question or fact and matter of whether the leader so named, that is, appointed or knighted actually possesses the requisite talent and skills set for the direly needed socioeconomic development of the country. So far, none of these bizarre set of circumstances clearly surrounding the death of President Mills appears to be of any consequence to younger brother Samuel Atta Mills, except lavish and self-glorifying preparations for the 10^th anniversary celebration of the passage of the deceased (See “Is There No Sensible Person in Akufo-Addo’s Government to Remind [the] Leadership [about] the Dignity of the Dead? – Samuel Atta Mills” Modernghana.com 7/20/22).

Now, Dear Reader, you tell me, as well as the membership of the global Ghanaian community, precisely what is so “dignified” about the lavish celebration of a dead man the clearly mysterious circumstances surrounding whose death have been totally ignored by the victim of this obvious palace assassination’s own blood relatives? Now, what are we, Ghanaians, supposed to be heartily celebrating about the memory of the late President John Evans (Fiifi) Atta-Mills here, except his scandalous and flagrantly smug supervision of the wanton corruption and the official abuse of the powerful and influential positions of public trust by the late President’s own cabinet appointees and operatives?

And, by the way, while we are still at it, I have been wondering for quite sometime now, whether Mr. Samuel Atta Mills, like his late brother, was also born a twin, or the man just decided to opportunistically appropriate the purely “congenital” title of “Atta,” my late mother also had it, so that he could be readily identified with his distinguished and globally renowned late brother. By “distinguished” in the latter context, I am obviously referring to the well-known fact of Prof. Mills’ having carved a respectable scholastic niche for himself as an Associate Professor of Taxation Law at the University of Ghana, Legon, as well as having been professionally associated with such globally prestigious American tertiary academies as the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania-based Temple University, the graduate alma mater of yours truly, and the California-based Stanford University, where Prof. Mills had once been named a Visiting Research Fellow.

You see, as a politician and later substantive President of the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana, Prof. Mills was decidedly unprepossessing. And that is putting matters very mildly, diplomatically and euphemistically. You see, in President Mills, we had the profile of a leader the celebration of whose skin-of-teeth victory in December 2008, was immediately followed by his very public and brazen appearance with Mr. Alfred Agbesi Woyome, Ghana’s most infamous political robber-baron in recent memory and the foremost underwriter of the extortionate political establishment of the Chairman Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings-founded National Democratic Congress (NDC).

In that infamous public appearance, the then newly elected President Mills would shamelessly lift the right hand of Mr. Woyome, boxing-champion fashion, and tell the global Ghanaian community that the biggest political thief and thug of our time owed the Ghanaian taxpayer absolutely zilch, in terms of cedis and pesewas; and that, indeed, it was the Government of Ghana, meaning, the John Agyekum-Kufuor-led government of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), that owed Togbega Woyome millions of cedis in unpaid work done, in the shape and form of a half dozen, or so, stadiums and sports complexes which the “Asante Mafia Capo” – those are their own words, by the way – had flatly and adamantly refused to honor. It will, of course, shortly pan out that, in fact, the Mills-Mahama regime had criminally colluded with Togbega Woyome to literally fleece the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana to the humongous tune of GH₵ 51.2 million in liquid cash.

In short, this is the profile of the University of London-educated President Mills that the patently unconscionable likes of Monsieur Samuel Atta Mills and the horrid horde of the National Democratic Congress’ leadership would have Ghanaians commemorate and celebrate as the most morally righteous of all five Fourth Republican Ghanaian Presidents. Yes, this is the unvarnished profile of the late President Mills whose memory, his wantonly and pathologically kleptocratic National Democratic Congress’ associates would have Ghanaians envisage to have been the most economically savvy and protective of all of our postcolonial leaders, beginning with President Kwame Nkrumah, of course.

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

August 10, 2022

E-mail: [email protected]