NDC Will Disintegrate Because Ghanaians Will Never Forget Dumsor and Rank Corruption

Contrary to what he would have his fellow National Democratic Congress' partisans believe, the latter “revolutionary” political establishment will not, in fact, disintegrate if NDC does not emerge winner of the December 2024 General Election. but former House Speaker Edward Doe Adjaho is smack on target to anxiously recognize the fact that his party of pathological and clinically incurable kleptocrats can simply not cheaply ride on the crest of the current economic hardships ravaging the country, and the rank unpopularity of the Akufo-Addo government to facilely coast to victory. You see, Ghanaians are not that simple-minded and morbidly amnesiac, as Osagyefo Nana Kwame Gonja once pontifically and imperiously supposed and smugly asserted.

Plus, we also remember what those four-and-half years of Dumsor – that is, the perennially erratic supply of electricity – did to the country, which was far more economically catastrophic than the present COVID-19 and Russia-Ukraine War-induced global recession (See “NDC Will Disintegrate if We Lose 2024 Elections – Doe Adjaho” Modernghana.com 11/26/22). The retired National Democratic Congress' Member of Parliament for the dissolved Avenor-Ave Constituency, in the Volta Region, is right to recognize well beforehand that his party risks seismically losing the 2024 General Election. But this is primarily because the top-echelon leadership of the NDC fails to equally recognize the glaring fact that inadvisably aligning the agenda of the party with the vaulting and patently quixotic ambitions of a megalomaniacal former President John “European Airbus Payola” Dramani Mahama is highly unlikely to resonate with progressive and forward-looking and forward-thinking Ghanaian voters.

Even more significantly, the leaders of Ghana's main opposition party have yet to convince Ghanaian voters about what they intend to do to meliorate the acute distress of the country's poor and destitute that will be different from most of the seminal and salutary social-intervention programs already put in place by the New Patriotic Party (NPP), such as the landmark and historically unprecedented Akufo-Addo-implemented Fee-Free Senior High School System, the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), and the restoration of the Teacher-Trainee and Nurse-Trainee Allowances, which Candidate Mahama, on the stumps in the runup to the 2020 Presidential Election, deviously hinted that he would only be able to maintain it for at the most one academic year before forcing each and every Teacher and Nurse Trainee to take up bank loans as a means of tiding themselves over, as it were, even as they strenuously pursued their frontlines professional training and career goals.

Which is also why it reeks with patent and inexcusable absurdity, when Mr. Adjaho asserts self-deceptively that the National Democratic Congress is “a social democratic party” that “puts ordinary people at the center of what we do.” Maybe the Ghana Law School and the University of Ghana Faculty of Law graduate needs to be reminded about the fact that politicians who put the people at the center of their national-development programs and agenda would not have so callously, unconscionably and grossly incompetently supervised the effective collapse and the total bankrupting of the National Health Insurance Scheme and the very infrastructure of our National Healthcare System (NHS). Ghanaian voters have also not forgotten the empty shells of engineless vans and minivans that Mr. Alexander Segbefia, the John Dramani Mahama-appointed Health Minister, imported from Germany under the specious and criminal guise of replenishing the totally dysfunctional stock of the National Ambulance System (NAS) in the runup to the 2016 General Election.

You see, a people-centered system and governance was exemplified by the opportune importation of the 300-plus brand-new and first-rate ambulance vehicles by Mr. Kwaku Agyeman-Manu, the Akufo-Addo-appointed Health Minister, which Mr. Bernard Allotey-Jacobs, the former Central Regional Chairman of the National Democratic Congress, rapturously lauded as one that was so heavenly as to almost promptly cause the complete recovery of a dying patient being rushed to the hospital in any one of them. Predictably, for telling his fellow party stalwarts and the Ghanaian people the unalloyed and unvarnished truth, the self-described “Cape Coast Fisherman” would be summarily expelled from the party.

Maybe somebody needs to tell Edward Doe Adjaho that the leaders of a political party that puts the needs and the welfare of ordinary people and citizens at the center and forefront of its national-development agenda would not expel a staunch and high-ranking member among their ranks who frankly and honestly lauded the good deeds of even an inveterate political opponent, who was executing many of the same long overdue people-centered social-intervention programs and projects which they also pontifically claimed to believe in. The truth to the High Heavens of the matter is what Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of Ghana (SCOG) Jones Victor Mawulorm Dotse eloquently and poignantly observed, when the 69-year-old judicial giant characterized the Mahama Posse as a bunch of cutthroat cynical politicians whose first order of business was to “create, loot and share” the collective wealth and resources of the Ghanaian people among themselves. Some words of wisdom for critically thinking and forward-looking Ghanaian citizens and voters.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York

November 26, 2022
E-mail: [email protected]