Candidate-General Gnassingbe Is a Has-Been Perennial Presidential Candidate, Mr. Pratt – Part 2

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Yes, I surefire as hell expected 70-year-old Mr. Kwesi Pratt, Jr., to butt into Nana Akufo-Addo’s inimitably biting counter-salvo to the Serial and the Dynastic Presidential Candidate of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), on the question of which of these two leaders willfully and unconscionably aided and abetted official corruption in the country, because the Managing-Editor of the so-called Insight newspaper long ago served public notice that he would be darn stupid and a clinical buffoon, to speak much less about an arrant fool, to go to bat for any of the key operatives of the then main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), a neoliberal social-intervention and market-oriented political establishment that the Agona-Nsabaa native, from the Central Region, deemed to have absolutely no business assuming the democratic reins of governance in our beloved Motherland, that is, for the overwhelming majority of the Ghanaian citizenry.

Interestingly and not surprisingly, though, the Dinosaurian alum of the Ghana Institute of Journalism (GIJ) has proven himself to be, indeed, a clinical buffoon and an arrant fool all right, especially when one reckons the fact that the “perennial” and “serial” and the “dynastic” vaulting presidential ambition and insufferable desperation of the twice-defeated, one-term former President John “European Airbus Payola” Dramani Mahama to “reclaim” power from a lame-duck President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo is a patently delirious wish that is nigh impossible for the Bole-Bamboi native, from the Akufo-Addo-created Savannah Region, to achieve because in the steadily approaching November 7, 2024 Presidential Election, Okogufuo Yagbonwura Kwame Gonja will be facing off against a much younger, savvier and an even more formidable political force in the person of the now Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia, against whom the Rawlings-wannabe may not even have the proverbial Chinaman’s chance.

He may not have even a Chinaman’s chance because the Savannah Accelerated Development Authority (SADA) Gravy-Train Driver and Conductor is an also-run and has-been hopelessly spent political force whose unspeakably gross administrative incompetence is a traumatic track record that is too deeply and indelibly etched into the memory banks of the overwhelming majority of the Ghanaian electorate to be easily forgotten so soon. You see, contrary to what a logically flippant and scandalously incoherent Mr. Pratt would have his audience believe, there is a stark and a light years of incomparable difference between the serial presidential runs of the 79-year-old man who was twice, consecutively, elected as substantive President of the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana and those of the fast and prematurely aging 64-year-old twice-defeated, one-term former President John “Ford Expedition Payola” Dramani Mahama, the man who once cavalierly and publicly confessed to a BBC radio and television reporter that soliciting and taking bribes at the expense of the Ghanaian electorate was part and parcel of the privileged portfolio of both the Presidency and the latter portfolio’s immediate adjunct of the Vice-Presidency.

Now, is this morally and legally indefensible image and reputation what the overwhelming majority of Ghanaian citizens and voters would have any of our leaders project to the outside world or the putative International Community at large? Definitely not, if the Dear Reader were to ask of Sincerely Yours. Not surprisingly, a politically opportunistic Mr. Pratt, who was also once on the Special List of National Democratic Congress-sponsored Media Propagandists Allocated Free-Fuel Rations by the tandem Mills-Mahama regime, is likely more avidly looking towards having his free-fuel ration bonanza restored or reactivated by a kleptocratic Mahama regime back at Jubilee House, than towards the general wellbeing of the Ghanaian citizenry at large. You see, during the three consecutive shots that the now President Akufo-Addo took at Jubilee House or the Presidency, the legendary “Leprechaun of Akyem-Abomosu” had absolutely no lackluster or dismal performance track record at the Presidency, that is, either at the level of the Vice-Presidency or as a roundly rejected has-been substantive President of the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana, unlike his much younger and far, far less talented immediate predecessor, to wit, Mr. John “Brazil Embraer Scam” Dramani Mahama.

Rather, of course, Nana Akufo-Addo had already firmly established for himself an enviable ministerial performance record as the Agyekum-Kufuor-appointed Attorney-General and Minister of Justice who had single-handedly crafted and delivered the landmark Repeal of the Criminal Libel Law, the summary and permanent revocation of the abominable British-authored primitive and barbaric instrument for the suppression and repression and the wanton oppression of the fundamental human rights of a brutally conquered and savagely colonized and politically enslaved Ghanaian citizenry. Then also, for only a relatively minor example of his dozens of progressive national-development achievements, former President John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor has gone on public record to have declared the now President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo to have been the Ghanaian leader who originally introduced the first commercial mobile phone company (Mobitel?) into the country. Now what the foregoing means is that unlike the infamous “Shit-Bomber,” Nana Akufo-Addo arrived at the Presidency with a fetching performance track record. Which is also, ironically, why Ghanaian voters and citizens had an exceptionally high expectations of good governance and socioeconomic prosperity from him.

On the other hand, Candidate-General John “Gnassingbe” Dramani Mahama has gone on record as having been the first Ghanaian politician and minister-of-state to have introduced what odiously became known as “Shit-Bombing” into Ghana’s Fourth-Republican political culture. The latter was the National Democratic Congress-fangled attempt to viciously silence media dissent by literally discharging raw and untreated human waste onto the premises of privately owned media establishments, largely newspaper organizations and enterprises, marked down and targeted for being hostile to the late President Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings-led populist regime of the National Democratic Congress, of which Okogufuo Yagbonwura Kwame Gonja was Deputy Communications Minister and later substantive Communications Minister. “Shit-Bombing,” which often occurred under the thick or the cover of darkness, was a surefire means of silencing these privately owned governance watchdogs and the protectors of the fundamental human rights of the longsuffering Ghanaian people.

Absolutely no wonder then, that Kwame Gonja has been having an extremely difficult time coming to terms with the fact that in a robust and civilized democratic culture such as that which is presently being religiously pursued in Ghana’s Fourth Republic, the power to govern the country is legally and inalienably vested in the Sovereign Citizens and periodically ceded via the franchise or universally acclaimed suffrage, and not crudely and forcibly “reclaimed” at the whim of just about any clinically insane megalomaniac and a pathologically kleptocratic politician with a delirious sense of entitlement to the same.

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
September 16, 2023
E-mail: [email protected]