Scheming Mahama and Brother-in-Law Hudu Mogtari Are at It Again

It is quite strategically fascinating that whenever the name of Mrs. Joyce Bawa Mogtari is mentioned in the media, it is almost invariably neutrally connected to the description of the latter’s being the “Special Aide” to former President John “European Airbus Payola” Dramani Mahama, although Mrs. Bawa Mogtari is also first cousins with the infamous West-Gonja native from Bole-Bamboi, in the Akufo-Addo-created Savannah Region (See “Hudu Mogtari Is in a Better Position to Brighten the Chances and Fortunes of the NDC in Wa-Central” Modernghana.com 4/29/23).

We make mention of the preceding because almost always when the names of Mr. Kenneth Ofori-Atta, the Finance Minister, and the Minister for Roads and Highways, Mr. Kwasi Amoako-Atta, are mentioned, the tendency has been for journalists and reporters to add the fact that these two gentlemen politicians and cabinet appointees are also the blood relatives of the President, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo. There is clearly a strategic media bias here that is ostensibly geared towards making the twice-defeated, one-term President seem more like being relatively more politically objectively minded and a meritocratically oriented leader than his immediate and present successor.

Which is rather absurd, in view of the fact that Mrs. Bawa Mogtari also served in the capacity of Deputy Road Transport Minister and even once personally confessed to having driven around the country without a driver’s license for at least a couple of years, while her cousin, then President Mahama, self-righteously caused the arrest of motorists trawling our roads and highways bereft of a driver’s license and even an expired legitimately issued driver’s license. Now, you will never hear of any such act of inexcusable criminality and the reckless endangerment of the lives of Ghanaian citizens by any of the relatives of Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo inside the government of the most visionary and progressive Fourth Republican Ghanaian leader.

The clear and unmistakable objective here, on the part of some of these media operatives, is the implicit suggestion that, somehow, President Akufo-Addo is prone to an unsavory level of nepotism of a kind or breed that cannot be said of his immediate predecessor although, even as Mr. Kennedy Ohene Agyapong, the Assin-Central’s New Patriotic Party Member of Parliament, has had innumerable occasions to point out, the former President would have equally significantly or even more so included many of his close relatives in his cabinet, if any of them had been relatively even half as qualified as the relatives of the proverbial “Little Man from Kyebi.”

The glaring reality which is often cavalierly ignored is that, indeed, the now Candidate-General John “Gnassingbe” Dramani Mahama is relatively far and away given to the morally unsavory politics of nepotism in ways that cannot be said of the legendary firebrand human and civil rights who, almost single-handedly, crafted the landmark Repeal of the Criminal Libel Law, an extortionate instrument of wanton political repression of the freedom and the human and civil rights of the Ghanaian citizenry dastardly introduced by the erstwhile British colonial regime to Ghana and nearly each and every one of Britain’s colonial territories and possessions, so-called.

Many Ghanaians, true to the prediction of Candidate-General John “Gnassingbe” Dramani Mahama, may have also so soon forgotten the fact that it was a Mahama kinsman and clansman who pulled the most scandalous heist over and above the heads of unsuspecting Ghanaian taxpayers in the criminally overvalued Vice-Presidential Mansion, which only came into the light of public knowledge in the wake of the seismic defeat of the then President Mahama in December 2016, as yet another one of those myriad uncompleted boondoggle projects that was, like all the national development projects undertaken by the Mahama regime, criminally overvalued to the tune of more than quadruple the cost of the prevailing market price, according to the public testimony of Mr. Johnson “The Mosquito” Asiedu-Nketia, at the time in reference, the General-Secretary of the National Democratic Congress and, presently, the National Chairman of the latter political establishment.

If this writer recalls accurately, the Mahama-initiated Vice-Presidential Palace had been kleptocratically valued at GH₵ 12 million when, according to “Lt-Col” Asiedu-Nketia, the superannuated recent graduate of the Senior-Staff College of the Ghana Armed Forces, it could not have been worth more than GH₵ 2 or 3 million. We also need to recall how the Mahama relative put in charge of this Vice-Presidential Boondoggle literally vanished into ether when media sleuths and national security investigators decided to track him down for questioning. This is the kind of fiscal accountability that the Woyome-sponsored Mahama and Asiedu-Nketia Posse are apt to serve Ghanaian taxpayers once more, if we make the socioeconomically fatal error of returning these Savannah Accelerated Development Authority (SADA) Gravy-Train Drivers and Conductors to Jubilee House.

But what we even more significantly want to highlight here is the fact that it was Alhaji Hudu Mogtari, the Mahama in-law and husband of Cousin Joyce Bawa Mogtari, who was the Mahama-appointed Chief Executive Officer of the Food and Drug Authority (FDA), when the National Medical Stores (NMS) that supplies most of our hospitals, health centers and clinics around the country were set ablaze, in the wake of the landslide and seismic defeat of the then President John “Akonfem-Kanazoe Ford Expedition Payola Ouagadougou” Dramani Mahama in December 2016 or early 2017. Reader, beware of these “mistakes correcting” born-again politicians.

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
June 16, 2023
E-mail: [email protected]