Amaliba, but Your Candidate-General, “Gnassingbe” Mahama, Is a Liar, a Thief and a Joker in One Piece

The Akan ethnic majority of Ghana have a saying that: “If Mr. Naked promises you a bolt of cloth, carefully pay attention to his name.” This maxim was what immediately flashed through my mind, when I came across a news story headlined: “NPP Flagbearer Race: Bawumia Is a Liar, a Joker; He’s Unfit for the Purpose – Abraham Amaliba” Modernghana.com 5/26/23). The tragic irony and the pity here is that Mr. Abraham Amaliba, a member of the Communication and Legal teams of the country’s main opposition political party, the National Democratic Congress (NDC), is a man without any constituency base of support even in his own semiurban community of birth in the Upper-East Region.

At least twice, Mr. Amaliba ran in the parliamentary primaries of his party in the very community and constituency in which he was born and raised and got mercilessly beaten, literally, to pulp. He would later blame tribalism for his gross political incompetence. Now, this is not something that anybody who has studiously followed his smashingly successful political career can credibly say about the twice-elected Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia. Equally significant to quickly point out here is the fact that even the Serial and Dynastic Presidential Candidate of the National Democratic Congress, Mr. John “Gnassingbe” (European Airbus Payola) Dramani Mahama cannot boast about having won two consecutive nationwide elections for either Vice-President or substantive President of the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana. Instead of accepting his woeful lack of talent and gross administrative incompetence, Candidate-General Gnassingbe Mahama prefers to deceive his Gonja- and northern-born kinsmen and women into believing that Ghana’s 1992 Republican Constitution entitles all presidents-elect to serve two consecutive terms in office, just like Presidents Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings, late, and John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor.

Now, such feat as has been impeccably notched by Vice-President Bawumia takes a lot of visionary and progressive and responsible leadership that is worthy of the unreserved trust and confidence of the Ghanaian electorate and the citizenry at large. In Candidate-General Gnassingbe Mahama’s latest run for the Presidential Nomination on the ticket of the National Democratic Congress, for example, the Bole-Bamboi native, from the Akufo-Addo-created Savannah Region, is widely, reliably and indelibly recorded by the media to have forked up at least GH₵ 40 (Forty Ghana Cedis) apiece to clinch 98-percent of the votes of the 350,000-plus registered party delegates who participated in the party’s widely acknowledged heavily flawed May 13, 2023 Presidential Primary.

You see, a candidate with the sort of enviable performance track record that Mr. Amaliba would have Ghanaian voters believe encapsulates the career profile of Candidate-General Gnassingbe Mahama would not be buying the votes of party delegates at the reliably estimated humongous bribery sum of GH₵ 50 million (Fifty-Million Ghana Cedis). Now, the Dear Reader can just imagine just how much the twice-defeated Candidate Mahama is likely to spend for vote-buying in the 2024 Presidential Election. Which why the next most logical question that all eligible and prospective voters in next year’s watershed General Election are obligated to ask both themselves and one another is this one: Precisely where did Serial and Dynastic Candidate-General John Gnassingbe (Ford Expedition Payola) Dramani Mahama got his payola money?

As well, who and where are his sources of payola money? Now, what this means is that not only does Okogufuo Yagbonwura Kwame Gonja need to be immediately and thoroughly investigated and promptly have his asserts declared and audited, Ghanaians also need to know precisely how he intends to recoup or recover such strategically dicey outlay of hard currency, in the highly unlikely event that he gets elected President come December 7, 2024 or thereabouts. I mean, if the twice-defeated one-term former President is so filthily awash with hard currency or liquid cash, how come that Candidate-General Gnassingbe Mahama has been publicly and bitterly complaining of having an extremely difficult time paying this relatively insignificant salaries and wages of the well over a dozen employees who he has listed on the Government’s payroll at the expense of Ghanaian taxpayers? As well as his office space, utility bills (such as light and water) and foreign travel expenses? This is the striking profile of the proverbial Robber-Baron!

And this is the kind of pathological “liar,” a “joker” and the “thief” that kleptocratic and freeloading cynical opposition politicians like Mr. Amaliba would have the rest of us believe is the right man to clean up the “mess” that the former Mahama-appointed Executive Board Member of the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC) claims to have been created by President Akufo-Addo and Vice-President Bawumia and their cabinet appointees and executive assigns and operatives. Isn’t it therefore more than crystal clear that any inadvisable decision by the overwhelming majority of Ghanaian voters to have Candidate-General Akonfem-Kanazoe Gnassingbe Dramani Mahama return to Jubilee House could very well plunge Ghana’s macroeconomy into a much deeper hole, perhaps even a bottomless hole, than Ghanaians have had to endure under the present Akufo-Addo Administration?

Especially when Candidate-General Gnassingbe Dramani Mahama has also been shamelessly bold enough to let on to Ghanaian voters that his first order of priorities, in the highly unlikely event of being returned to Jubilee House, would be to “Correct my past mistakes.” Somebody much wiser and more progressive-minded had better tell charlatanic agitprop goons like Comrade Amaliba that Ghanaians prefer to live the harsh and unvarnished realities of the present, while working diligently to ensure a decent and comfortable future, rather than foolishly coddle morally depraved and intellectually dimwitted self-infatuated politicians.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
May 26, 2023
E-mail: [email protected]