How Candidate-General Gnassingbe Mahama Got His 98-Percent Delegate Votes

It was only a matter time – a very, very short time, to be certain – before it came to light that the twice-defeated Serial and Dynastic 2024 Presidential Candidate-General of Ghana’s main opposition party, the National Democratic Congress (NDC), Mr. John “European Airbus Payola” Dramani Mahama – aka Candidate-General Gnassingbe Dramani Mahama – as had already been widely rumored in the wake of the party’s May 13 Presidential-Election Primary, had actually paid an officially disclosed sum of GH₵ 40 (Forty Ghana Cedis) to each and every one of the 350,000-plus registered delegates who participated in both the party’s Presidential and Parliamentary Primaries which were held on the same day.

This above-referenced payola sum, which should ordinarily have come from the National Treasury of the National Democratic Congress to ensure the induction of the proverbial level playing field, actually came from the wallet and the bank account of the one-term former President who has been bitterly and publicly complaining to Ghanaian voters and citizens that his statutorily mandated retirement benefits, as well as the monthly salaries of his post-presidential staff of more than a dozen party hangers-on, among them several of his own blood relatives and in-laws, have not been regularly paid on schedule by the Akufo-Addo Administration since Okogufuo Yagbonwura Kwame Gonja was jackbooted out of Jubilee House in January 2017.

Now, we are being told by Mr. Theophilus Tetteh Chaie, described by the media as the Greater-Accra Regional Secretary of the National Democratic Congress, that, in fact, the former President had deposited millions of cedis in liquid cash and New Cedi Denominations into the bank accounts of the party in each and every one of the 16 regions of the country, to be parceled out to each and every registered party delegate only after each and every one of these delegates had personally and physically appeared at their respectively designated polling stations and cast their ballots, in the specious guise of “Transportation Reimbursement.”

Now, the Dear Reader does not need to have acquired a college degree or even a Senior High School Certificate to reach the definitive conclusion that the procedural timing of the disbursement of these “Transportation Allowances” were primarily meant to ensure that each and every recipient had, indeed, cast his or her ballot on behalf of Candidate-General Gnassingbe Dramani Mahama. Else, our protagonist could readily have arranged for publicly owned and privately owned buses to transport these delegates to their respective polling stations in the various parts of the country. Paying these delegates hard currency was clearly about the only way that the Bole-Bamboi native, from the Akufo-Addo-created Savannah Region, would have been able to clinch the statistically scandalous and historically unprecedented 98-perecent of the votes that he was reported to have clinched by the Jean Adukwei Mensa-headed Independent Electoral Commission (GI/EC).

For those of our readers who may be too young to remember or might not yet have been born at the time in reference, it used to be only in such one-party Francophone dictatorships as Togo, Benin and The Ivory Coast (La Cote D’Ivoire), for only a handful of examples, where the routinely lone Presidential Candidate, who was also routinely rubberstamped by Parliament or the National Assembly as “President for Life” who obtained upwards of 90-percent of the electoral votes. Invariably, under the preceding circumstances, all the polling station agents, monitors and returning officers belonged to the same political party. And it was this kind of “Democratic Primitivism” that Ghanaians witnessed in the May 13 National Democratic Congress-sponsored Presidential and Parliamentary Primaries.

In more than several polling stations, there were widespread reports of some Gnassingbe Dramani Mahama agents and assigns attempting to photograph the ballot papers of voters whose loyalties appeared to be in serious doubt by “The Mosquito Gang,” strictly commanded by the superannuated recent graduate of the Senior-Staff College of the Ghana Armed Forces, to wit, “Lt.-Col.” Johnson Asiedu-Nketia, who was also recently elected National Chairman of the National Democratic Congress, having also served as the Dynastic and Monarchical General-Secretary of the latter party or political establishment for nearly 20 years.

Now, what is both interesting and significant to highlight here is the fact that the kind of rank corruption that partly resulted in the democratic overthrow of Candidate-General Gnassingbe Dramani Mahama and the rest of the horde of hoodlums that constitutes the leadership of the National Democratic Congress, continues to seriously and, definitely, auspiciously expose the dirty political dealings of, in the memorable and indelible words of Candidate-General Gnassingbe Dramani Mahama, the leadership of the most “violent” and “bloody” political party in the entire postcolonial history of Ghana.

Well, Ghanaians awoke one breezy morning about a couple of days ago, only to be rudely treated to the rather quaint and all too pedestrian news report that Mr. Emmanuel Nii Ashie Moore, the newly elected Greater-Accra Regional Chairman of the National Democratic Congress had, somehow, decided against the unanimously agreed upon “Gnassingbe Gameplan” by deliberately and, perhaps, even deviously pocketing an undisclosed relatively humongous portion of the vote-buying payola sum that had been deposited by the unofficial new proprietor of the party, to wit, Okogufuo Yagbonwura Kwame Gonja, in the party’s Regional Treasury or Bank Account (See “Ashie Moore Accused by NDC Executives of Pocketing Mahama’s Cash Meant for Delegates” Modernghana.com 5/25/23).

There is an ironic twist here which the key operatives of the National Democratic Congress, as usual, may not have espied in the offing. It has to do with Candidate-General Gnassingbe Dramani Mahama’s recent byelection campaign whistlestop in Kumawu, a hermetic stronghold of the ruling New Patriotic Party in the Asante regional heartland, during which the former Arch-Lieutenant to the late President John Evans Atta-Mills pontifically accused the leaders of the NPP of distributing among their party delegates a species of rice locally called “Tugyimi” or “Foolishly Expanding Cooked Rice,” in exchange for votes. As it turns out, Dear Reader, the joke was always on the 60-something-year-old self-righteous and finger-pointing political scam-artist in the mirror.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
May 29, 2023
E-mail: [email protected]