Bawumia Is the Most Pragmatic Way Forward for Ghana Beyond Aid

Lord Paul Boateng’s most poignant and sobering observation that all postcolonial Ghanaian governments, including the present Akufo-Addo-led government of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), have royally failed the Ghanaian people, ought to give Ghanaian leaders great cause and pause for concern, especially jaded and politically spent Ghanaian leaders like the twice-defeated, one-term former President John “I Have No Classmates in Ghana” Dramani Mahama, the nauseatingly recycled Serial and the Dynastic Presidential Candidate of the country’s main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), who would have the overwhelming majority of Ghanaian voters return him to Jubilee House, “So that he could correct his past mistakes” (See “Ghana must break free from external aid dependence — UK House of Lords Member” Modernghana.com 6/18/24).

For Lord Boateng or Sir Paul, whose father, the late Mr. Kwaku Boateng, was a cabinet appointee in the government of the late President Kwame Nkrumah-led Convention People’s Party (CPP), and who had been partly schooled in Ghana while growing up, until the Kotoka-led 1966 military putsch that ousted the CPP, President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, with whom he is contemporaries, epically failed in his promise to steer Ghana away from economically crippling foreign-aid dependency, after courageously and pontifically declaring before France’s President Emmanuel Macron that it was far past time for Ghana and the rest of Postcolonial Africa “to cease relying on external aid, if we were to successfully break the vicious cycle of dependence on external aid and those great powers who have fed and continue to feed on Africa’s resources and whose activities with their willing [internal bourgeoisie comprador] collaborators [continue] to hold Africa down in an impoverished and conflicted posture.”

The self-designated Lord Boateng of Akyem-Abuakwa is reported to have issued the preceding morally instructive indictment during a lecture presentation that he delivered on the Madina, Accra, Campus of the University of Professional Studies (UPSA) on the theme of “Fulfilling the Promise: The Challenge of Leadership! Moving from Rhetoric to Delivery.”

The Scottish-mothered Lord Boateng is not quoted or reported to have directly used the following words. But it was crystal clear that the firebrand former Member of the British House of Commons was very disappointed about the painful fact that Nana Akufo-Addo was a leader who appeared to be far more inordinately addicted to rhetorical pontification than the practical confrontation of the grim reality of Ghana’s economic fragility and perennial vulnerability on the ground, thus his passionate call for a more visionary and robust leadership that was poised to addressing the fundamental socioeconomic problems of the country and one that was geared towards sustainable future development and self-reliance, and not one that was a veritable cardboard and an inexcusable pretext for political opportunism of the kind represented by the likes of Candidate-General John “Gnassingbe” Dramani Mahama, that was irredeemably stuck in the primitive and the ancient past and narcissistically obsessed with facilitating the “correction of the past mistakes” of a diapered political and a psychological toddler who cavalierly presumed his morbid ego trip to Jubilee House to be far more significant than the pressing needs and the hopes and the aspirations of some 35-million Ghanaian citizens.

Here again and, once again, Sir Paul did not name names but it was strikingly obvious that the Akyem-Tafo native had in mind the likes of none other than the Bole-Bamboi native from the Akufo-Addo-created Savannah Region. Which also immediately makes one wonder whether the former Deputy British Finance Minister and former High Commissioner to South Africa had been sedulously following the futuristic and the economically sustainable activities of Digital Wonder Boy and Buckingham and Oxford universities-educated Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia, the 2024 Presidential Candidate of the ruling New Patriotic Party, who is widely tipped by many pollsters and the overwhelming majority of Ghanaian citizens and voters to succeed a lame-duck President Akufo-Addo.

For Lord Boateng, it was rather tragic that the value of an earned doctoral degree in Ghana was being unfavorably compared to the mere acquisition of a Dutch passport on social media by a non-college educated recent Ghanaian emigrant to The Netherlands. This miserable state of affairs sadly reflects on the global standing of Ghanaian education, Sir Paul is widely reported to have lamented.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
September 1, 2024
E-mail: [email protected]