Listen to the SADA Gravy-Train Driver

Anybody who cares to ask the New Patriotic Party’s 2024 Presidential Primary Runner-Up upfront about which Fourth-Republican President of our beloved Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana is the real Clearing Agent for bribery and corruption, would unquestionably and undoubtedly be pointed in the direction of the twice-defeated, one-term former President John “I Have No Classmates in Ghana” Dramani Mahama, the man whose younger half-brother, Mr. Ibrahim Mahama, imported tons of mining equipment into the country and kept presenting more than two dozen dud or fake checks for the payments of his customs duties. And guess what, Dear Reader? This act of heinous criminality took place smack under the watch of then President John “Ford Expedition Payola” Dramani Mahama!

You see, the Bole-Bamboi native, from the Akufo-Addo-created Savannah Region, is trying to distract the attention of the overwhelming majority of Ghanaian citizens and voters from the readily verifiable fact that he is the treasonous Architect of the globally infamous Savannah Accelerated Development Authority (SADA), a thievish boondoggle corporate board of exclusively northern-descended friends and cronies of Yagbonwura Okogufuo Kwame Gonja that fleeced our National Treasury to the humongous tune of billions of dollars. But for the landmark and the auspicious and the timely intervention of a seismically elected President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, not a dime or a dollar would have been retrieved from the Agambillas and the Abuga Peles…. The list of treasonous freeloading beneficiaries of SADA continues ad-nauseam.

Has anybody forgotten the Mahama-contracted GYEEDAs and the GUBAHs? Indeed, were he present in body with us right now, my very good friend and dear elder brother Mr. Sydney Casely-Hayford would have presented us with a full-list of the blood-sucking Mahama cronies and tribesmen and women who literally took Ghanaian taxpayers for a ride. Which is why it comes as absolutely nothing short of plain comical verging on a theatrical slapstick for the man whom the Founding-Father of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), the late former President Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings publicly, incessantly and disconsolately described as the most thoroughgoing corrupt postcolonial Ghanaian leader, to be calling the man who actually cleaned up the unspeakable mess left in the wake of the seismic 2016 defeat of the infamous “Shit-Bomber” a “Clearing Agent” (See “I Won’t Be a Clearing Agent Like Akufo-Addo, I’ll Ensure Greater Transparency – Mahama” Modernghana.com 6/19/24).

In a recent lecture presentation that Kenya’s Prof. P L O Lumumba delivered to the members of the Bible Society of Uganda, on the theme of Christian Mentorship, the renowned and the distinguished Law School Dean and legal light and wit recounted a story told him by a friend, in which the airport of an African country heavily trafficked by Muslims with a special room exclusively reserved for traveling prayerful or devout Muslims had an inscription written on a wall, counseling travelers not to hesitate or feel anxious to leave their luggage and/or their baggage in the aforesaid specially assigned room for such purpose: “Because There Are No Christians Who Frequent This Place.” The obvious implication here, of course, was that travelers of the Christian faith were relatively far more likely to steal the luggage and the baggage of their fellow Christian travelers than their Muslim brothers and sisters.

This quite interesting and memorable story was what immediately flashed through my mind, when I came across that portion of the brief news report that constitutes the essence of this equally brief commentary about an intellectually and a politically exhausted Candidate-General John “Gnassingbe” (Ouagadougou-Nkonfem Flying) Dramani Mahama’s having delivered his characteristically trite and morally arid and rancid Akufo-Addo-baiting slogan or mantra to the faculty, students and the staff members of Christian Service University (CSU), located in the Asante Regional Capital of Kumasi, during the 50^th Anniversary Celebration of the aforementioned parochial or missionary institutional establishment not very long ago.

On any good day, the Dear Reader can rest assured that Yours Truly is apt to prefer the jolly company of a “Corruption Clearing Agent” than the antisocial and the unpatriotic and pathologically unconscionable perpetrator of the criminal act of corruption itself. Then also, it was rather flabbergasting to learn that of all possible lecture-presentation topics or themes, the career Ghanaian politician who has done more to treasonously undermine our hard- and fiercely fought Fourth Republican Democratic Culture than any other postcolonial Ghanaian leader, would actually be invited to deliver a lecture on the massively oversized theme of “The Sustainability of Democracy in Africa.” After all, don’t we all know from the very authoritative radio-broadcast confession of Mahama Prime Kingmaker, namely, Mr. Johnson “The Mosquito” Asiedu-Nektia, at the time the General-Secretary of the then-ruling National Democratic Congress, that the 2012 Presidential Election had actually been illegally and criminally declared by the extant Electoral Commission’s Chairperson, Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan, in favor of Kwame Gonja, because the New Patriotic Party’s polling agents and the Akufo-Addo-sponsored polling observers and monitors had not been vigilant enough or had, quite a significant number of them, been bribed with lunches and pocket-money payolas by some operatives of the National Democratic Congress?

And then just recently, Ghanaians also learned from such politically authoritative and patriotic Ghanaian citizens that had it not been the timely intervention of His Royal Majesty, The Asantehene, Otumfuo Osei-Tutu, II, that had literally pulled the brakes or the kibosh on a Mahama-appointed Electoral Commission’s Chairperson, namely, Mrs. Charlotte Kesson-Smith Osei, from criminally calling the results of the 2016 Presidential Election in favor of the epic loser, to wit, an Incumbent President John “European Airbus SE Payola” Dramani Mahama, Ghanaians would presently be wallowing in an unspeakable socioeconomic mess of apocalyptic proportions. Rather funny and downright comical or not so, Dear Reader?

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

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