Masterful Presentation but Much Too Long

As was all to be expected, the middle-aged man from Walewale, in the North-East Region, was at his maximum and eloquent best. You see, a smart and an ambitious man born to equally smart and ambitious parents, does not travel all the way from the Old Northern Region, having also attended Sakasaka public schools and the Tamale Secondary School (popularly called TAMASCO) to our nation’s sprawling capital of Accra which, by the way, at the time was also the capital of the Eastern Region, and fly high up the sky and all the way to the global Megalopolis of London, to attend a scarcely known local business college in London, and then straight on to Buckingham University, not far from that globally storied palace of English lore and mythology, on to Oxford University and, then, once more, fly high up the sky and end up at British Columbia’s Simon Fraser University, in the British Dominion of Canada, and then, finally, back home, again, in Accra, as Deputy-Governor of our National Treasury, the Bank of Ghana, with a First-Class Doctorate. And then as the humble conductor or the mate of a pathologically self-absorbed widely alleged to be the badly pampered Oxford University Dropout dauphin of an Oxford University graduate of Philosophy and Mathematics.

Of course, such is life and the nature of things in our all too rough-edged and morally skewed and imperfect world. All the preceding, of course, by the by, is herein being strictly delivered in jest. Absolutely no derogatory or pejorative connotations intended here. You see, when he sternly and studiously faces the oceanic bank of media microphones and looks into the mountains of television cameras before him, the five-foot-six-tall dark-brown-skinned man verging slightly on plumpness begins his address with a characteristic touch of humor. He boldly and confidently declares: “I am like a driver’s mate. Please, kindly make me the driver, fellow Ghanaians; excuse me, countrymen and women. For I have had more than my fair share of training and preparation as a driver’s mate.” He sounds uniquely urbane and dignified.

Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia stands smack in a class of his own; he does not sound anywhere like the characteristically peevish, pathologically comical and insufferably uncouth and repulsively narcissistic Serial and the Dynastic Presidential Candidate of Ghana’s main opposition political party and faux-socialist ideological establishment, namely, the Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings-minted and peremptorily chaperoned, at least for quite a considerably while, National Democratic Congress (NDC). It is a faux-socialist political party and ideological establishment because the entire leadership of the National Democratic Congress, with absolutely not a single individual exception, espouses the socioeconomically arid and infertile politics of populism, whereby the name and the plight of the overwhelming majority of the lumpen-proletariat of Ghana’s citizenry, in particular eligible Ghanaian voters, is earnestly, if also vacuously, used in Orwellian propagandistic fashion to brazenly and crudely solicit power and then wantonly and recklessly rape and lord it over the very unsuspecting people or electors so cheaply and suavely induced to surrender their constitutional and statutory mandate to these “Tar-Beetles” or “Taa-Woto”-shod Cash-and-Carry Apostles of Death and Destruction, in-toto.

The entire institutional setup and the leadership of the present John “Ouagadougou Nkonfem-Flying” Dramani Mahama- and Johnson “The Mosquito” Asiedu-Nketia-led National Democratic Congress is anything but “democratic” or social-interventionist oriented. Which is essentially why Candidate-General John “Gnassingbe” Dramani Mahama far and away prefers the cheap and tawdry electioneering-campaign mode of such socioeconomically and ideologically vapid soapbox sloganeering as his so-called 24-Hour Economy. You see, these intellectually exhausted National Democratic Congress Pseudo-Scholars hate to haunch down for even a split-second to break a drop of sweat or two in order to come up with a practically feasible or operable national-development plan, let alone a national-development agenda.

“These charlatanic Apostles of Impossibilities,” as the 2024 Presidential Candidate of the ruling New Patriotic Party on Wednesday, February 7, told a standing-room-only audience of party stalwarts and progressive-minded Ghanaian citizens and some members of the diplomatic corps in the high-capacity auditorium of the Madina, Accra-based University of Professional Studies Accra (UPSA), “Believe that the only thing that can be achieved in the realm of possibilities is to recklessly and callously and criminally dismantle all successful social-intervention programs and projects implemented and established by the main rivals of these eternally sworn demolition squad of irredeemable nation-wreckers.”

Which was essentially why even Mr. Samuel Koku Sitofe Anyidoho, the diehard NDC partisan and Communications Director to the late President John Evans Atta-Mills, had the prime occasion to snidely and cynically remark that on the day that Vice-President Bawumia, the widely presumed next President of the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana, was poised to rolling out his vision and strategic policy agenda for the development of the country over the next four years, beginning from January 7, 2025, of course, a Happy-Go-Lucky and past-mistakes-correcting Candidate Mahama was busy crisscrossing the country with his 24-Hour Economy Circus Act.

In other words, 9 months after he literally bribed and rigged his way to the top electioneering ticket of the National Democratic Congress, for the third consecutive time, an irredeemably exhausted, jaded and pathologically effete Candidate Mahama continues to desperately talk about which catalogue of the Akufo-Addo-led and the Bawumia-partnered successful national development projects and programs his longshot NDC government-in-waiting is poised to either thoroughly revise, significantly improve upon or simply gut or scrap without absolutely any meaningful thought of possibly replacing the same.

We have said this before and hereby find it relevant to, once again, reprise the same presently, here and now. The unarguable fact of the matter is that Yagbonwura Kwame Gonja cannot improve upon the efficiency or the viability and the quality of any Akufo-Addo- or a New Patriotic Party-implemented social-intervention program or project which, by the way, the Bole-Bamboi native, from the Akufo-Addo-created Savannah Region, had initially kicked against virulently as a practical impossibility. You see, no amount of hot air blowing propaganda gimmickry is apt to change the concrete reality on the ground. It is as simple as “ABCD.”

*You may visit his blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
February 9, 2024
E-mail: [email protected]