Interestingly, I also arrived at the selfsame conclusion arrived at by Mr. Abraham Koomson, described by the media as General-Secretary of the Ghana Federation of Labor (GFL), vis-à-vis the selection of some 319 people as members of the Manifesto Committee for the 2024 Mahamudu Bawumia Presidential-Election Campaign Team, at the same time that the substantive Vice-President of the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana has been telling Ghanaian citizens and voters that in the most likely event of him being handed a victory in the December 7, 2024 Presidential Election, the former Deputy-Governor of the Bank of Ghana intends to govern the country over the next four years with a maximum number of 50 Cabinet Appointees (See “NPP Has Become Double-Minded Political Party and Dangerous to Trust – GFL” Modernghana.com 2/26/24).
Already, he has savvily said that he intends to create a managerial and/or a governance tent that is large enough to comfortably accommodate each and every shade of opinion and ethnicity and creed or religious and cultural background in his administration. So, it makes absolutely perfect sense that Dr. Bawumia would select as many people as he has reportedly announced as constituting the membership of his Election-Manifesto Campaign Team. The apparent anxiety of the likes of Mr. Koomson, the GFL General-Secretary, is that Candidate Bawumia is strikingly and eerily beginning to sound dangerously like then-Candidate Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo who, in the runup to the 2016 Presidential Election, pontifically told Ghanaian citizens and voters that he intended to run the country with less than half of the 845 Cabinet Appointees that officially constituted the executive core of the previous Mahama regime.
Well, even as we speak, in the wake of his long-overdue cabinet reshuffle and the dismissal of approximately two dozen ministerial appointees, Nana Akufo-Addo’s government still has nearly 400 ministerial appointees more than the previous Mahama regime. Of course, the cogent argument could be made that relatively speaking, the twice-elected present Akufo-Addo government has far and away outperformed its immediate predecessor. But, of course, such a cogent and forensically and empirically easily verifiable claim still does not significantly meliorate the equally critical question of credibility and trust, which is precisely what the GFL’s Mr. Abraham Koomson is talking about, except that the GFL’s leader and critic also glaringly fails to explain precisely why he firmly believes that the faux-socialist and social-intervention averse National Democratic Congress (NDC), that is, an NDC political establishment that is being led or rather being misled into the watershed 2024 Presidential Election by the twice-defeated Serial and the Dynastic Presidential Candidate of the latter Cash-and-Carry political party and ideological establishment is any viable alternative to the neoliberal and social-intervention oriented government of the presently ruling New Patriotic Party.
Now, there is the rub, in classic Shakespearean speak or parlance. On the whole, it absolutely goes without saying that the Mahama-led National Democratic Congress has absolutely no progressive and worthwhile national-development agenda for the country. Which is precisely why even long-proscribed nuisance party apparatchiks like Mr. Martin ABK Amidu, the briefly Akufo-Addo-rehabilitated moral and intellectual basket case, would be criminally and vacuously promoting Candidate-General John “Ouagadougou-Nkonfem” Flying” Dramani Mahama as a contrite and repentant “born-again” candidate who deserves to be afforded another clearly undeserved chance of Jubilee House occupancy.
Then again, who said that serious leadership and any worthwhile national development aspiration could be practically fulfilled or materially met by a politician whose foremost reason or sole objective of being returned to power is the narcissistic and the delirious desire of being allowed to “correct my past mistakes,” almost blasphemously as if the entirety of the lives and the livelihoods of some 35-million-plus Ghanaian citizens and voters are far less significant than the vainglorious ambition of a royally failed Yagbonwura Okogufuo Kwame Gonja. What kind of morally egregious and downright stupidity is this?
On the other hand, one cannot but unreservedly concur with the Ghana Federation of Labor’s Mr. Abraham Koomson that there is something unspeakably egregious with the recent decision by a lame-duck President Akufo-Addo to import some diesel-powered trains from overseas, presumably Western Europe, at the same time that the government also claims to be smack among the vanguard ranks of Green-Revolution Promoting Governments and Nations around the world. As well, about the same time that the government is at the forefront of the Digital Revolution and the Climate and Environmental Protection Movement.
Very likely, as has become characteristically and nauseatingly scandalous with the leadership of many a so-called Third-World country, the rather lame-brained decision to import diesel-powered or operated trains was superficially based on the short-term cost “analytical paralysis,” rather than the deleterious long-term impact and cost of these “industrial lemons” on the economic survival of the present generation of Ghanaian citizens and the future generations of our grandchildren and great-grandchildren ad-infinitum. Allah, Nyame, God save us from our arrant stupidity! Where is Kevin Baidoo Taylor, when we need him the most?
*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr
By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
February 26, 2024
E-mail: [email protected]