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Another Good Reason Why Mahama Must Be Rejected in 2024 Polls

Feature Article Another Good Reason Why Mahama Must Be Rejected in 2024 Polls
MAR 22, 2023 LISTEN

The original caption that had been intended for this column was “A Good One There, Dr. Yaw Osei-Adutwum!” or “Another Well-Deserved Facial Smack for Kwame Gonja.” But, you see, anybody who has been writing for as long as yours truly, or even much longer, is well aware of the fact that once a writer sits down to compose a story that has been well-thought-out or about beforehand, a lot of things can happen. In other words, such stories have a way of “getting way out of hand” and literally writing themselves out. That was pretty much what happened with the present one. I have actually not really thought about this story in progress for as much as and as long as many of the previous ones, because I only chanced across the rather catchy headline of “I’ve Never Been President; Why Question Me on Education? – Dr. Adutwum Blasts Mahama” (Modernghana.com 3/21/23).

It was a darn really “Good One There!” were the Dear Reader to ask me, because it was a simple and an opportunely stinging case of a snooty SOB, as New Yorkers are wont to say, being forced to look at himself and then his own “Fufu-Kisa” or “Stale-Fufu” face in the mirror as never before and then some to terms with the reality on the ground. Of course, we all vividly and painfully remember that sweltering moment of a day in the runup to the 2016 Presidential Election, when Ghanaian citizens and voters were rudely reminded by an insufferably presumptuous and downright imperious and unquestionably arrogant President John “European Airbus Payola” Dramani Mahama, that they were absolutely by no means his peers for any of us to casually presume to have been endowed with any inalienable constitutional right to question the abjectly poor and grossly incompetent manner in which the Bole-Bamboi native, from the Akufo-Addo-created Savannah Region, was managing their affairs and, by logical extension, the sacred affairs of the country at large.

A morbidly and pathologically self-infatuated Okogufuo Yagbonwura Kwame Gonja would further rudely tell off the very people whose sovereign and sacred mandate had put him into the most lavish and spacious suite in the John “Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor-constructed “Republican Stool House,” with the generous financial backing of the Indian Government, that when it came to Ghanaian political culture and, in particular Ghana’s Presidential Politics, the soon-to-be democratically ousted Chief Resident of Jubilee House had absolutely no peers or classmates, except for the then two living former Presidents of our august Republic, namely, Messrs. Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings and, of course, our just-mentioned proverbial Gentle Giant. Both then-President Mahama and his mysteriously “vanished” former boss, to wit, the recently deceased President John Evans “Atta-Woyome” Mills, would disdainfully label Jubilee House as a veritable chicken coop that was decidedly unfit for human habitation.

Now, with the recent epochal passage of President Rawlings, I guess we could safely say that Candidate Mahama has been left with only one presidential and/or political peer in all the land. It is almost certain that this Dynastic Presidential Candidate and the presumptive 2024 Nominee of Ghana’s main opposition political party, the National Democratic Congress (NDC), still does not regard our presently incumbent President, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, and Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia as his peers and coequals on the Fourth Republican Ghanaian political landscape. Which is all well and good, except that the man who once reportedly told a BBC news reporter that bribery and corruption were his pastime and favorite political diet would be hard put to deny the fact that a man who has twice defeated the former Atta-Mills’ second bananas for occupancy of the highest office of the land, is still his political inferior or even ideological subaltern and thus absolutely in no way qualified to compare his relatively much better job performance to President Dumsor’s own.

The same challenge, of course, goes for Yagbonwura Kwame Gonja in his imminent and impending epic slugfest with the now-Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia. Now, on the question of the necessity to closing down poorly performing public schools and the transfer of all students of such poorly performing schools to much better performing schools, it absolutely goes without saying or contest that Education Minister Yaw Osei-Adutwum could not have made a better decision. You see, this is routinely done hereabouts in the United States of America, where the Lake-Bosomtwe native, from the Asante Region, extensively schooled and obtained his Doctor of Philosophy Degree in Education and had actually been blessed with the chance and the rare privilege of actually running an award-winning chartered school district in the Golden State of California, in ways that could not be credibly and creditably said of Candidate Mahama’s 2016 Running-Mate, namely, Prof. Jane Naana Opoku-Agyeman, the immediate past Minister of Education and first female Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cape Coast, who presided over the worst performing public school system in both the postcolonial history of Ghana and the history of the contemporary civilized world at large.

On the latter count, we refer to a global survey conducted by the internationally respected and United Nations-sponsored and Paris, France-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), in which Ghana placed butt-naked last, as New Yorkers are accustomed or wont to say, out of the 145 countries surveyed. This was circa 2010, when the late President John Evans “Atta-Woyome” Mills firmly and imperiously held the democratic reins of governance and the murderously ambitious then Vice-President Mahama was the former’s right-hand man.

In short, if any individual Ghanaian politician or leader qualifies to singularly determine the most appropriate solution for failing schools in the country, that one or single Ghanaian leader or politician is none other than Dr. Yaw Osei-Adutwum, a man who knows how to progressively practice what he preaches, when it comes to the well-being and the ringing future success of Ghanaian youths, and the man who has diligently earned the unsolicited and unreserved endorsement of yours truly for Running-Mate to Candidate Mahamudu Bawumia on the ticket of the ruling New Patriotic Party in the 2024 Presidential Election.

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
March 22, 2023
E-mail: [email protected]

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