Even President Nkrumah Got Routinely Booed at Rallies

When did the Yahyah Kwamoah-mauling Mahama anti-media pit-bull become “an activist of the National Democratic Congress”? Yet, in a recent news report captioned “Only a Fool Will Think Boos at Akufo-Addo Was [a] Political Masterpiece, Your Card[-]Bearing Members Were Part and Loudest – Stan Dogbe Jabs NPP” (Modernghana.com 9/26/22), we had Mr. Eric Nana Yaw Kwafo describing the former Mahama Presidential Communications Director curiously as “an NDC activist.” This is the former Mahama Communications Director who made up an Independence-Celebration Program Brochure for Ghana’s 59^th birthday anniversary in which he listed Mr. Uhuru Kenyatta, the recently retired Kenyan President, as the substantive President of the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana. It must have been in 2016.

So, of course, it is quite obvious that the man who has been widely implicated in the bedroom-stabbing assassination of the extant Akyem-Abuakwa-North’s New Patriotic Party (NPP) Member of Parliament (MP) is fast on the way to breaking cleanly with his violent and bloody past, to speak much less about his gross administrative incompetence, and suavely assuming a far more politically benign low-profile image and reputation. But whether such a strategically mischievous assay at the political equivalent of reconstructive surgery could be successfully negotiated in time for the 2024 General Election is anybody’s good guess. This is the same Mahama presidential bully that the now-Speaker Alban S K Bagbin once described as the de facto President of the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana under the decidedly figurehead Presidency of Mr. John “European Airbus Payola” Dramani Mahama.

Could Eric Nana Yaw Kwafo know something more about the true identity and relationship between this diehard Trokosi Nationalist Mafia Capo and the National Democratic Congress’ establishment that the longest-serving NDC-MP does not? At any rate, the widely reported booing of President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo over this just-past weekend (Sept. 24, 2022) was historically of little significance or consequence, when one also reckons the fact that Ghana’s first and immortalized postcolonial leader, President Kwame Nkrumah, is on readily accessible record as having been the most booed and publicly humiliated Ghanaian leader in the postcolonial era. Even so, it is quite obvious that the thunderous booing of Ghana’s former Foreign Minister and Minister of ECOWAS Integration was deftly and systematically orchestrated by the Mahama Posse at the Global Citizens’ Concert that was organized at the Black-Star Square, in the nation’s capital of Accra.

That pretty much explains the reason why Mr. Stanislav Xoese Dogbe would literally scramble for his Facebook Wall and desperately seek to do what amounted to damage control, by claiming half-heartedly that some card-carrying members of the ruling New Patriotic Party were “part” of the audience of Akufo-Addo hecklers at the concert. We do not the least bit doubt that, indeed, some bona fide members and operatives of the ruling New Patriotic Party may have participated in the booing of Nana Akufo-Addo. But this absolutely in no way discounts the fact that the entire attempt to embarrass the President was incontrovertibly orchestrated by the key operatives of the country’s main opposition National Democratic Congress. We have striking and indisputable evidence in the Kumasi kidnapping of the three, white Canadian NGO volunteer women which the leadership of the NDC, led by the officially indicted but never convicted Mr. Samuel Ofosu-Ampofo, the latter party’s National Chairman, was allegedly caught on audiotape saying that he and his NDC associates and veritable political scumbags intended to use as one of the surest means of ousting the popularly and democratically elected Akufo-Addo-led government of the New Patriotic Party.

There are also several striking incidents of seditious activities orchestrated by the Mahama Posse which time and the focus of the present column do not permit delving into. Still, we could not agree more with Prof. Ransford Yaw Gyampo, the University of Ghana’s political scientist, that the National Security Wing of the ruling party, or even the National Security Ministry itself, ought to have conducted some intelligence gathering to size up the pulse of the audience and the general security climate prior to the arrival of the President at the Global Citizens’ Concert’s venue. The foregoing notwithstanding, the possibility of such booing was all to be expected, in view of the President’s apparently adamant refusal to heed the voices of the very people whose electoral mandate put him into Jubilee House and their vehement calls for a cabinet reshuffle, in particular calls for the prompt removal of the Finance Minister, Mr. Kenneth Ofori-Atta, and the latter’s replacement with a far more visionary, foresighted and competent appointee.

We, however, do not envisage the heckling of the President at the Black-Star Square to be even half of the “monumental embarrassment” that Prof. Gyampo would have the rest of the nation believe that it was (See “Boos at Akufo-Addo: Someone Failed and Caused this Monumental Embarrassment – Prof. Ransford Gyampo” 9/26/22). At the very worst, it was a well-needed clarion call for the proverbial “Little Man from Kyebi” to wake up and heed the voices and the opinions of the people who made Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo what he gloriously is today.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

September 26, 2022

E-mail: [email protected]