Alhaji Sinare, You Are Fighting a Lost Cause with John “SADA” Mahama – Part 1

What is predictably asinine on the part of National Democratic Congress (NDC) stalwarts like Alhaji Said Sinare, is this stubborn belief that, somehow, the overwhelming majority of the Ghanaian citizenry desires to be returned to the very worst four-and-half protracted and benighted years of our Fourth Republican dispensation. Well, for those of our readers who were either too young or, like the trite and jaded Mahama mantra, have the memory capacity of toddlers in diapers, under the immediate predecessor of the proverbial “Little Man from Kyebi,” more than half of all business enterprises in the country were literally and callously ground to a screeching halt as a result of “Dumsor,” the perennially erratic supply of electricity and other related forms of energy.

It was also under Mr. Mahama that the word “Dumsor” entered the global lexicon/dictionary as a synonym for gross administrative incompetence. The rate of unemployment also more than doubled, with the charlatanic likes of Mr. Samuel Okudzeto-Ablakwa, the loud and foulmouthed Mahama minion and attack dog spinning “Animal Farm”-like propaganda spiels that criminally insulted the intelligence and common sense of the Ghanaian people, by scandalously and murderously insisting that the rate of unemployment in the country had actually been brought down to its lowest level in Ghana’s postcolonial history.

Now, heading into the watershed 2024 Presidential Election, what is inexcusably pathetic to point out here is the farcical idea that, somehow, Ghanaians are so psychologically masochistic that they would rather gladly be returned to the apocalyptic and catastrophic era of Dumsor, although for two consecutive electoral seasons, that is, in 2016 and 2020, Ghanaian voters spoke loudly and clearly about the fact that they were over and permanently done with the man who so corrupted and disfigured Ghana’s democratic culture beyond recognition by creating what came to be known as the Savannah Accelerated Development Authority (SADA), that many of us began to wonder whether British colonial imperialism had not been exchanged by our Founding Fathers for anti-Kabonga or anti-Southern Ghanaian intracolonial subjugation by the Mahama Posse.

You see, SADA was an Akufo-Addo copycat project that was supposed to speed up the economic development of the northern half of the country but only ended up lining the pockets, purses and wallets of a handful of Mahama cronies, to wit, the Agambillas and the Abuga Peles and, of course, the Mahamas and the Mogtaris. You see, Dear Reader, what was even more criminally democratically abominable about the Mahama-established Savannah Accelerated Development Authority was the fact that for one to be deemed qualified to sit or serve on SADA’s Board-of-Directors, one had to prove to have either been born in one of the present Five Northern Regions, so-called, or to be descended from one of the northern-located ethnic groups.

Now, this is the sort of “clean” and “corruption-free” governance that Okogufuo Yagbonwura Kwame Gonja would have Ghanaians return to, with the staunch and fanatical backing of half-Ghanaian and half-Egyptian kleptocrats like Alhaji Sinare, the former National Vice-Chairman of the National Democratic Congress. Alhaji Sinare, also a sometime Ghana’s Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, is a notorious kleptocrat who was widely alleged to have literally stolen huge caches of furniture from his official residence in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, and had them shipped to his private residence in Egypt, his motherland, in the wake of the seismic defeat of then-President Mahama in 2016, and the end of the diplomatic tenure of Ambassador Sinare.

Like the man whose insufferably rancid presidential candidacy he has been cynically and doggedly pushing for quite some time now, Alhaji Said Sinare has absolutely no love or loyalty for Ghana, his fatherland. He well appears to envisage the wealth and resources of Ghana as veritable spoils of war or booty to be seized and shared among the movers-and-shakers of the National Democratic Congress. In this sense, Mr. Sinare is absolutely no different from Mr. Alfred Agbesi Woyome, the robber-baron Dean of the major financiers of the National Democratic Congress, who creamed our National Treasury in the wake of the skin-of-tooth victory of the late President John Evans Atta-Mills, under false and fraudulent pretenses, and literally divvied up the same among the key operatives of the Mills-Mahama government.

Which is precisely why, once again, it comes as nothing short of the inexcusably absurd to hear the handsomely paid NDC propagandists pontificate about how Candidate Mahama’s imminent return to Jubilee House will be akin to a kind of Rawlings-like “Housecleaning” agenda. The criminal and pathetic irony here is that for all the four-and-half years that the now-Candidate Mahama held the democratic reins of governance as substantive President of the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana, a significant percentage of his staunchest and most trusted cabinet appointees illegally took home double salaries at the expense of and to the detriment of Ghanaian taxpayers with the collusive complicity and a smug sense of entitlement to the same.

On the latter count, however, President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo and several of our most prominent and influential Paramount Chiefs ought to bear an equal portion of the blame. You see, it is the equally criminal refusal and/or flagrant and adamant failure of the then newly elected President Akufo-Addo to vigorously and rigorously punish the double-salary squirreling Mahama cabinet appointees that ominously set the tone for the woefully failed official corruption fight by the proverbial “Little Man from Kyebi.”

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
March 12, 2023
E-mail: [email protected]