Can Any Responsible Ghanaian Citizen Really Trust John Mahama?

It was rather absurd to hear Mr. Daniel Ohene Agyekum, the Atta-Mills-appointed former Ghana’s Ambassador to the United States of America, call the integrity of Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia, recently nominated as the 2024 Presidential Candidate of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP), into question, almost as if to pontifically declare that bilking Ghanaian taxpayers to the humongous and the scandalously criminal tune of € 5 million, in the globally infamous European Airbus Payola Affair, was a laudable contribution to the development of Ghana’s macroeconomy that better qualified the twice-defeated, one-term former President John “Ford Expedition Payola” Dramani Mahama to be returned to Jubilee House in January 2025, over a far more progressive, competent and morally trustworthy President Mahamudu Bawumia (See “Bawumia Is Not Someone You Can Trust – Retired Diplomat” Modernghana.com 11/13/23).

It goe s without saying that any man dubiously parading himself in the noble guise of a distinguished retired diplomat, who so promiscuously consents to serving in the government of a former President who firmly believed that the GH₡ 51.2 million Alfred Agbesi Woyome Heist, at the treasonous expense of Ghanaian taxpayers, was the most patriotic act of the expression of one’s unimpeachable citizenship, does not deserve any serious hearing in any respectable forum on any matter verging on the character and the professional integrity of Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia, tipped and widely reputed to have the most fetching chance of permanently retiring the globally infamous Serial and Dynastic Presidential Candidate of the Johnson Asiedu-Nketia-cannibalized main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC).

Well, in an interview that the 81-year-old stalwart member of the latter political establishment recently granted the Accra-based Ultimate-FM radio station, Ambassador Agyekum did not seem to have much to say that was substantive about the man who led the landmark and yeomanly effort to redenominate The Cedi, Ghana’s official legal tender, to make it portable, once again, after it had literally been reduced to a shinplaster or virtual junk by the late President Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings-led regimes of both the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) junta and the faux-socialist and dubiously civilianized and democratically elected National Democratic Congress. To the preceding effect, this was what Mr. Agyekum had to say to his Ultimate-FM interview host about the former Deputy-Governor of the Bank of Ghana: “I have read about Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia; I have heard about him; I have listened to his speeches, captured in videos and on audiotapes. And I will say this: Bawumia strikes me as a person who cannot be trusted.”

Most prominent on his list of what Mr. Agyekum claimed to irreparably detract from the credibility of the Vice-President, was the manifesto declaration by the New Patriotic Party of ensuring that each and every electoral district or constituency in the country was adequately equipped with at least one full-capacity factory or industrial plant. Ambassador Agyekum cynically claims that this is one of the several dozens of the national development policy agenda in which the Akufo-Addo Administration has miserably failed to deliver. Now, the problem here is that Ambassador Agyekum conveniently failed to account for the fact that the present government has been promising to build or establish at least one manufacturing plant in each and every district in the country, more than six decades after Ghana gained her sovereignty from British colonial rule, because nearly every one of the scores of seminal industrial plants and factories established by Ghana’s first postcolonial leader, President Kwame Nkrumah, have been destroyed by the leaderships of both Rawlings-led junta of the Provisional National Defense Council and the present National Democratic Congress.

In other words, whatever happened to the over 120 factories and industrial plants constructed by the Kwame Nkrumah-led government of the Convention People’s Party (CPP), throughout most of the 1950s until the overthrow of the CPP on February 24, 1966? On the foregoing count, of course, we are talking about the seminal agglomeration of factories and manufacturing plant facilities, upwards of some 120 of them, classified under the umbrella of the Ghana Industrial Holdings Corporation (GIHOC). Now, what the preceding means is that going into the 2024 General Election, in particular the 2024 Presidential Election, Ghanaian voters have a bounden obligation to make the wanton and the indelibly criminal dismantling and the effective and thorough destruction of Ghana’s hitherto robust industrial base by the tandem Jerry John Rawlings-led ragtag and kleptocratic regimes of the Provisional National Defense Council and the National Democratic Congress, the latter political establishment of which the recently retired Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of Ghana, Justice Jones M Dotse, caustically characterized as a historically unrivaled cesspool of the wanton creaming of our national treasury and, in effect, the longsuffering, hardworking and unspeakably immiserated Ghanaian citizenry, a salient criterion of their electoral decision-making process.

By now, it ought to be crystal clear to the Dear Reader that if any corporate entity of Ghanaian leaders irredeemably lacks the kind of moral worth or credibility that Ambassador Ohene Agyekum is talking about, it is definitely the kleptocratic corporate establishment of the Mahama- and the Asiedu-Nketia-led, owned and chaperoned National Democratic Congress and not either Vice-President Bawumia or the ideologically and practically more progressive corporate entity of the New Patriotic Party. As well, had he been paying sedulous and critical attention to the practical happenings on the ground, as it were, Ambassador Ohene Agyekum would have since long learned that it was concerned environmental scientists who wisely counseled against the deleterious impact of constructing too many irrigation dams all across our equatorial and tropical environments, especially vis-à-vis the exponential and the catastrophic breeding of mosquitoes and its attendant heightening of the incidence of malarial infestation in both Ghana and the West African Subregion.

You see, contrary to what this evidently senile and barely coherent critic would have members of the global Ghanaian community believe, it is rather Candidate-General John “Gnassingbe” Dramani Mahama who has exhausted himself of any worthwhile idea for the development of the country, as the West-Gonja native, from the Akufo-Addo-created Savannah Region, has already had the rare and prime opportunity as substantive President of the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana and effectively wasted the time and the hard-earned resources of some 35-million Ghanaian citizens, over the course of some unduly protracted and punishing four-and-half years, with the abominable pall of Dumsor. Which is why this desperate and pathologically kleptocratic megalomania keeps vacuously talking about being afforded a second chance at the Presidency, so that he could correct his past mistakes. With Vice-President Bawumia, on the other hand, refreshingly and in the immortalized words of Nigerian writer, thinker, educator, poet, essayist and novelist Prof. Chinua Achebe, “It Is Yet Morning on Creation Day.” In simple terms, the best is yet to come.

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
November 14, 2023
E-mail: [email protected]