Trust Me, Big Brother Terkper, the Next Administration Will Not Be Headed by John Gnassingbe Dramani Mahama

If former John “Gnassingbe” Dramani Mahama-appointed Finance Minister, Seth Terkper, is delusively entertaining the possibility of a comeback in the wake of the watershed December 2024 General Election, the former Bretton-Woods token employee had better give himself a reality check about such practically farfetched, politically depraved and intellectually insulting ambition, because Ghanaians are darn fed up with the peevish and pathologically narcissistic antics of Yagbonwura Kwame Gonja. We have also come way too far into the bright and entrepreneurially progressive lights of the Sor-Sor Golden Age of the Akufo-Addo-led and the Mahamudu Bawumia-conducted New Patriotic Party (NPP) Green Revolution to allow ourselves to be docilely and passively bullied back into the Dumsor Stone-Age Culture blindly and lunatically championed by the Johnson “The Mosquito” Asiedu-Nketia goon squad (See “IMF Deal Will Have Serious Implications for Next Administration” Modernghana.com 5/18/23).

Now, it is rather ironic for the Krobo native, from the Akufo-Addo electoral stronghold of the Eastern Region, to be smugly referencing what Mr. Terkper downright hypocritically terms as the “serious implications” of the recent Ofori-Atta-brokered IMF Bailout Deal, unarguably the most progressive compact of its kind in Fourth-Republican Ghana and, perhaps, the entire African Continent as a whole. You see, Dear Reader, what all progressive Ghanaian voters and citizens and, to be certain, even Mr. Terkper himself, ought to be presently discussing with dead-seriousness is the kind of agreement that the previous rag-tag Gnassingbe Dramani Mahama regime struck with the principals of the twin Bretton-Woods establishments of The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, in 2015 or thereabouts, and the concomitantly pernicious and deleterious implications that the aforementioned agreement had for the immediately succeeding Akufo-Addo Administration, in particular the decidedly criminal bankrupting of the John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor-established National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), into which the then newly elected President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo had to reinvest the gigantic sum of at least $ 2 billion (USD), money that could have gone into other equally significant projects and ventures, such as the rehabilitative development and upgrade of the Mahama-wrecked public education system, in particular the Akufo-Addo-implemented Fee-Free Senior High School System.

Regarding the preceding ought to be highlighted the landmark Akufo-Addo-implemented Fee-Free Senior High School System, which Okogufuo Yagbonwura Kwame Gonja callously disparaged as one that was only possible in the clinically unbalanced imagination of a megalomaniacal politician hellbent on grabbing power at all costs. That the 2015 Kwesi Botchway-led IMF Bailout Agreement did absolutely nothing to improve the quality of life of the overwhelming majority of Ghanaian citizens, in particular hardworking civil and public servants and self-employed and business-owning Ghanaian citizens, is what we really need to be discussing right now within the Global Ghanaian Community, not the purely speculative anticipated negative impact or implications which the Ofori-Atta-brokered IMF Bailout Compact is apt to have on the Akufo-Addo/Bawumia revamped economy which, by the way, can only locally be expected to further significantly improve over the course of the next several months and far well before the game-changing December 2024 Generation Election.

If the figurative political mirror is anything to go by, then, of course, it indisputably goes without saying that a highly likely succeeding Bawumia-led New Patriotic Party government is far more apt to take Ghanaian citizens to the Biblical and historical Promised Land than the morally and socioeconomically catastrophic return of a pathologically self-infatuated Candidate-General John “Gnassingbe” Dramani Mahama to Jubilee House and the near-certain return to another insufferably protracted season of Dumsor and the apocalyptic “devolution” of the country’s fast-recovering economy.

Under the present Akufo-Addo Administration, more decent and livable-waged and salaried jobs have been created in Ghana’s Fourth Republic than were ever created at any other time in our beloved nation’s postcolonial history. Which ought to soberly inform all progressive-minded Ghanaian citizens that the sinister and ominous return of the man whose foremost, characteristically, self-targeted national development agenda is to correct his past mistakes, rather than significantly improve upon the present Akufo-Addo-led National Development Renaissance (NDR), for the collective benefit of all Ghanaian citizens and residents, is definitely not what Ghanaians are earnestly on the lookout for presently.

It is almost downright oxymoronic to observe that Mr. Terkper has absolutely no moral and professional credibility when it comes to judging the on-the-job performance track record of the present Akufo-Addo Administration or the erstwhile John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor-led government of the New Patriotic Party. You see, Dear Reader, Ghanaians have far, far better things to ponder and discuss and hash out for their wellbeing and prosperity than blindly allow themselves to be bullied and criminally fleeced or wantonly exploited, once more, by unconscionable double-salary squireling kleptocrats and robber-barons who also arrogantly think that the very people who graciously and, for the most part, unsuspectingly, granted them their sovereign mandate to govern the country and manage their affairs and resources have absolutely no right to critique or objectively criticize their job performance, because none of these electors and patriotic Ghanaian citizens have themselves ever been elected to serve at the Presidency. What blasphemous insult and abuse of borrowed power!

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
May 23, 2023
E-mail: [email protected]