Corruption-Complicit Bawumia Is Still Cleaner than STX and SADA Gravy-Train-Driving Mahama

The last place that any upstanding Ghanaian citizen truth seeker would think of mining for a “Moment of Truth” nugget of leadership accountability is the Adabraka, Accra, Headquarters of the country’s main opposition political party, the John “Savannah Accelerated Development Authority Gravy-Training-Driving” Dramani Mahama-led National Democratic Congress (NDC).

You see, a political establishment whose leadership’s very first order of business on January 7, 2009, was to write the humongous Woyome-fronting check in the nation-wrecking sum of GH₡51.2 million, under the fraudulent pretext of the party’s foremost underwriter’s having done unpaid work for the previous John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor-led government of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), in preparation for the African Cup of Nations Tournament (AFCON), could scarcely be trusted to jealously guard against the thievish and the profligate abuse of the public purse, in the memorable words of our present lame-duck President, to wit, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo.

Which was precisely why I could not help but literally fall off my couch, when I recently came across a very brief albeit gratuitously sensational news report, in which the so-called National Communications Officer of the National Democratic Congress, Mr. Samuel “Sammy” Gyamfi, was widely reported to have declared that the very first order of business, in the highly unlikely event of a pathologically kleptocratic Candidate-General John “Gnassingbe” (Ouagadougou-Nkonfem Flying) Dramani Mahama’s being returned to Jubilee House, would be to vengefully track down and rigorously prosecute all key operatives of the present Akufo-Addo government found to have either caused financial loss to the State or willfully and criminally misappropriated taxpayer money.

Now, the first problem that a wet-eared and politically diapered Mr. Sammy Gyamfi has is the fact that his own populist and taxpayer-scamming party, the National Democratic Congress, has absolutely no enviable track record of genuinely fighting official corruption in the country. At any rate, what many an economically depressed and deprived Ghanaian citizen is fervidly looking forward to having the next government do for him/her is to significantly improve upon such crucial social-intervention programs as LEAP, the Agyekum-Kufuor-implemented economic relief and assistance program for the lumpen-poor in Ghanaian society, the Fee-Free Senior High School System and the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), another timely and auspicious Agyekum-Kufuor-implemented social-intervention program that was thoroughly, callously, criminally and unconscionably bankrupted by the previous “mistakes-correcting” Mahama-led ragtag regime of the National Democratic Congress.

You see, absolutely no government, civilian or military, that ever made a national policy agenda out of raw vendetta or retribution since Ghana’s reassertion of its sovereignty from British colonial rule brought any significant benefits to any critical mass of fiscally needy Ghanaian citizens, except more misery and socioeconomic depression. Those among the rank-and-file membership of the National Democratic Congress who are old enough to remember, have a noble responsibility and a bounden obligation to school grossly misguided and morally and culturally unruly political upstarts like Sammy Gyamfi about the fact that the so-called Rawlings Revolution, dastardly orchestrated by the so-called Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) mutineers and, subsequently, the Rawlings-led Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), did not achieve for Ghanaians anything that is worth discussing in any serious column such as the present one.

In short, what Yours Truly is driving at here is the fact that if the present two-term Akufo-Addo government had studiously chosen to focus on prosecuting and incarcerating thievish operatives of the previous Mahama regime, including the hoodlum pack of double-salary drawing Mahama cabinet appointees, trust me, the twice-defeated Candidate-General John “European Airbus Payola” Dramani Mahama would not be so smugly and self-righteously begging Ghanaian voters to return him to Jubilee House, once again, so that he could correct his past mistakes. Very likely, he would be doing a long-term prison sentence with hard labor at Nsawam Medium-Security Prison.

A Presidential Candidate whose foremost priority agenda is going back to the past to correct at least four-and-half years of gross personal ineptitude and professional incompetence, it could actually be eight years, the bulk of it verging on capital criminality, such as the globally infamous abortive STX Housing Scandal, which cost Ghanaian taxpayers the vicinity of some $250 million (USD) – that is, a quarter-billion US dollars – by some media accounts, woefully lacks the requisite leadership stature and the credibility to be favorably compared to the twice-elected Vice-President Bawumia, let alone be returned to the very Presidency which he so abjectly downgraded (See “Complicit Bawumia Cannot Fight Corruption; Mahama Is Our Surest Bet – NDC” Modernghana.com 2/19/24).

The fact of the matter is that having twice defeated a thoroughgoing corrupt Candidate Mahama, in the memorable words of the late Founding-Father of the National Democratic Congress, to wit, former President Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings, unimpeachably attests to the fact of a President Mahamudu Bawumia being the foremost Ghanaian leader worth hedging one’s bet on or around, more than any other 2024 Presidential Candidate of any major political party in the country, to effectively fight and drastically reduce the presently unspeakable level of official corruption in our beloved nation. You see, being “complicit” in forensically and legally unproven allegations of corruption is decidedly not the same as being the “quintessence” or the very personification and paragon of official corruption, which is what Candidate-General John “Gnassingbe” Dramani Mahama is veritably in toto. It is also crystal clear that the leadership of the National Democratic Congress has absolutely no meaningful and/or progressive national-development agenda, heading into the 2024 General Election, short of criminally drawing home monthly double salaries at the expense of Ghanaian civil servants and blue-collar workers.

Ultimately, Election 2024 is an epic contest for the salvation of the soul and the protection and the preservation of the dignity and the integrity of the people of the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana, as well as between the implacably and the irredeemably sinister forces of Dumsor, on the one hand, and the progressive and the spiritually beneficent forces Sor-Sor. On the other; and, of course, the Dear Reader can bet his or her proverbial Bottom-Dollar that the overwhelming majority of Ghanaian citizens and voters are on the side of Sor-Sor.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
February 19, 2024
E-mail: [email protected]