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Who Really Believes or Trusts the Word of Candidate-General “Gnassingbe” Mahama?

Feature Article Who Really Believes or Trusts the Word of Candidate-General Gnassingbe Mahama?
JUN 9, 2023 LISTEN

I picked up this quote from the “Modern Ghana Photo Reports’” “Inside Politics” and “Trending News For You” quotable quotes’ section of the Modernghana.com media portal edition of June 5, 2023. The quote discussed in this column, however, is dated August 18, 2021. It has the twice-defeated, one-term former President, John “Gnassingbe” Dramani Mahama, making a vehement denial as follows: “[Akufo-Addo] Government communicators go and lie[sic] that I have given them [i.e., #FixTheCountry campaigners] 85,000 pounds and [that] I’ve given them GHS 1.5 million for their demonstration; [an] absolute lie. I haven’t given them one single cedi.’”

Now, who really believes this downright hollow denial from the kleptocratic robber-baron who spent an estimated GH₵ 50 million buying the votes of some 350,000-plus party delegates to secure the 2024 Presidential Nomination of the country’s main opposition political party, namely, the National Democratic Congress (NDC), in the May 13, 2023, general primaries of the latter party? In the latter instance, there were widespread media reports that each and every one of the approximately 300,000-plus party delegates who participated in this widely and officially acknowledged to have been rigged election was given the payola sum of GH₵ 45 apiece in the specious guise of coverage for the transportation fees for each and every one of these delegates.

Now, this is rather quaint but all too predictable because it was very obvious well before the May 13 NDC Presidential and Parliamentary Primaries that short of liquid-cash bribery, there were not many registered party delegates who were likely to travel or even walk a stone-throw’s distance to the polling booth to cast their ballots for the twice crushingly defeated former President, who rained Stygian darkness on them, a flagrant act of gross leadership incompetence that led to the effective collapse of more than half Ghanaian and foreign-owned business enterprises in the country for some four protracted years.

Cynical National Democratic Congress’ parliamentarians like Mr. Samuel Okudzeto-Ablakwa, the representative from North-Tongu, in the Volta Region, would later claim that in the four-and-hour protracted years during which the entire landscape of the country was blanketed or palled with the erratic supply of electricity and other forms of energy, the rag-tag regime of the Mahama-led National Democratic Congress had actually created some 200,000 (Two-Hundred-Thousand) jobs. But for widespread media allegations that some party officials entrusted with the former President’s payola payouts to party delegates during the May 13 Presidential and Parliamentary Primaries had cleverly pocketed the same and flatly refused to let such monies reach their intended destinations and recipients, an unsuspecting overwhelming majority of the Ghanaian public would have been left with the erroneous impression that, in fact, the party’s May 13 general primaries had been conducted on the proverbial level playing field.

We know that the election was heavily rigged because the most formidable challenger to the former President, namely, Dr. Kwabena Duffuor, the former Atta-Mills-appointed Finance Minister, had presented compelling evidence to this effect that had been widely recognized and publicly acknowledged by the top leadership of the party who, nonetheless, had willingly decided to sign onto the despotic Asiedu-Nketia ballot-rigging machine on behalf of the Bole-Bamboi native, from the Akufo-Addo-created Savannah Region. Now, this is the kind of reckless and dangerous politicking that all registered and eligible Ghanaian voters ought to bear in mind as they head towards the polling booth for the 2024 General Election. Prominent among top-hierarchy party operatives accused of having pocketed Candidate-General “Gnassingbe” Mahama’s delegate-vote-buying payolas was the newly elected Greater-Accra Regional Chairman of the National Democratic Congress, Mr. Emmanuel Nii Ashie Moore, former Member of Parliament for Adentan, an outer northeastern township in the Greater-Accra Metropolitan Area.

Which is why it absolutely goes without saying that a desperate and a megalomaniacal politician who is willing to fork up a humongous sum of GH₵ 50 million just to secure the votes of party delegates for a third consecutive party Presidential Nomination, the first two of which ended in apocalyptic failures, is highly likely to also fund an anti-government civil society whose main and sole objective is to create massive disaffection for the government of the man who twice crushingly dashed the hopes of the political comeback of Candidate-General John “Gnassingbe” Dramani Mahama, the former Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings’ protégé described by the globally acclaimed Founding-Father of the National Democratic Congress as the most thoroughgoing corrupt postcolonial Ghanaian politician and leader.

You see, what makes the preceding observations intriguing and significant is the fact that prior to the media exposé of Candidate-General “Gnassingbe” Dramani Mahama’s estimated payola “largesse” of some GH₵ 50 million to party delegates in the May 13, 2023 party primaries, the shamelessly self-righteous Serial and Dynastic Presidential Candidate of the National Democratic Congress had been virulently accusing the leadership of the ruling New Patriotic Party of having purchased the votes of constituents in Kumawu, in the country’s most populous region, to wit, the Asante Region, with a species of rice called “Tugyimi” which, in the most widely spoken Akan language of Ghana, La Cote D’Ivoire and elsewhere in the West African Subregion, means an “exponentially expanding cooked rice.”

We also need to underscore the fact that the leadership of the so-called #FixTheCountry civil society organization is almost wholly composed of diehard political machine operatives of the country’s main opposition National Democratic Congress. Which means that only an incredulously naïve Ghanaian citizen or resident would believe the former Rawlings-appointed Communications Minister, when Okogufuo Yagbonwura Kwame Gonja publicly denies, “Animal Farm” fashion, that he is the Chief Patron and the biggest and foremost financier of the #FixTheCountry movement.

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
June 5, 2023
E-mail: [email protected]

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