Organized Labor Merely Toadied Up to Ablakwa the Criminal Scofflaw and the NDC

It is downright farcical and not the least surprising that Mr. Daniel Yaw Domelevo, the Akufo-Addo-appointed and fired former Auditor-General, should be applauding the Samuel Okudzeto-Ablakwa-led Labor Union protests that culminated in the abrupt abrogation of the perfectly legitimate decision by the Managerial Board of the Social Security and National Insurance Trust (SSNIT) to sell off 60-percent shares of some poorly performing hotels belonging to the latter state-owned establishment to Rock City Enterprises, a hospitality management firm that is majority-owned by Mr. Bryan Acheampong, the New Patriotic Party’s Member of Parliament for Okwawu-Abetifi, in the Eastern Region, and the current Minister of Food and Agriculture (See “SSNIT Hotels: It Is Strange for Government to Sell State Property to a Member of Government - Domelevo” Ghanaweb.com 7/16/24).

Not the least bit surprising because Mr. Domelevo is also an ethnic Ewe like the man who once thumbed his nose at the Wood-presided Supreme Court of Ghana and literally got away with such treasonable act of inexcusable and heinous criminality, with the staunch and equally criminal backing of the late President John Evans Atta-Mills, the first National Democratic Congress-sponsored Incumbent President of Fourth-Republican Ghana to have “mysteriously” expired in office. Mr. Domelevo is also widely known to be a card-carrying member of the country’s main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), that is, the same political, ideological and institutional establishment that criminally collapsed the President Kwame Nkrumah-established Ghana Industrial Holdings Corporation (GIHOC), comprised of some 140 factories and manufacturing plants, and literally quartered up the same at flea-market or “Donkomi” prices among the top leadership of the National Democratic Congress.

Now, where was Mr. Domelevo and the rest of the self-righteous hoodlum ratpack of both the leadership of the National Democratic Congress and the so-called Organized Labor Leaders? But what is most significant to highlight here, and which has already been highlighted innumerable times, ad-nauseam, is the fact that the very process by which the proposed sale of the four SSNIT hotels was awarded to the Food and Agriculture Minister’s Rock City firm or Limited Liability Company, as authoritatively related by Ms. Elizabeth Ohene and Mr. Kofi Bosompem Osafo-Maafo, was via the conventional protocol of open tender, with public announcements and advertisements to the same effect having been widely published in nearly every major and reputable newspaper and media website and television station across the country.

Now, that was not what happened to the John Mahama and the Haruna Iddrisu-lifted $72-million (USD) that literally got set ablaze in the vaults of the Social Security and National Insurance Trust in the runup to the 2016 General Election, money that belonged to pensioners and retirees and actively engaged Ghanaian civil and public servants. In other words, absolutely no prejudicial attempt was made to blindside any potentially competitive bidder for the poorly performing SSNIT hotels in question. The critic may also have so soon and conveniently forgotten this, but in the Matter of Okudzeto-Ablakwa & Omane-Boamah v Obetsebi-Lamptey, the Wood Supreme Court judiciously ruled that there existed absolutely no such categories as First- and Second-Class Ghanaian Citizens, as was the official rule in the erstwhile Apartheid South Africa, with the key operatives of the then-ruling National Democratic Congress belonging to the First Superclass of Ghanaian Citizens and the rest of the overwhelming majority of the Non-Card Carrying Members of Ghanaian Society, including the members of the then main opposition New Patriotic Party, belonging to the Caboose or the Second Tier or Class and Category of Ghanaian Citizenship.

Now, for those of our readers who may have so soon forgotten the preceding cause celebre, it had to do with the perfectly legitimate purchasing of some state-owned landed and real-estate properties made available expressly for such purpose by the then lame-duck and outgoing John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor-led government of the New Patriotic Party, in strict observance and pursuit of a state-capturing precedent thievishly set by the previous Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings-led government of the National Democratic Congress. It has often been said that “Thieves Can Only Steal, They Cannot Retrieve,” contrary to what the Serial and the Dynastic Presidential Candidate of the latter political establishment would have Ghanaian citizens and voters believe in the runup to the watershed 2024 General Election.

Curiously but not the least bit surprisingly, when the proverbial wheel of the “state-capturing” fortune spinned for the turn of the New Patriotic Party’s kleptocratic and kleptomaniacal counterparts of the key operatives of the National Democratic Congress to generously help themselves to our commonwealth, during the dying stages of the Agyekum-Kufuor-led government of the New Patriotic Party, the newly elected and incoming vanguard operatives of the Mills-Mahama Posse, all of a sudden, began to cry foul. The Woyome Loot Engineers and Architects decided to make their immediate predecessors an exception to the National Democratic Congress-established norm. Now, what is quite fascinating here is that the Looting Brigade Commanders of the National Democratic Congress brazenly continue to portray their relatively more socially responsible counterparts of the presently ruling New Patriotic Party as the “National Property-Looting” and “State-Capturing” Neoliberal Capitalists.

The grim irony here, though, is that nearly every worthwhile social-intervention program and project specifically aimed at uplifting the lumpen poor and the destitute in the country was established by the twice, consecutively elected two New Patriotic Party-sponsored governments of Ghana’s Fourth Republic, namely, the erstwhile Agyekum-Kufuor-led government of the New Patriotic Party, and the present lame-duck Akufo-Addo-led government of the New Patriotic Party.

The glaring and the unarguable fact of the matter is that while the leadership and the institutional establishment of the New Patriotic Party can boast of such cross-partisan keystone national development cynosures as the low-premium National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), which the previous Mahama regime thoroughly bankrupted, and the Akufo-Addo-implemented Fee-Free Senior High, Technical, Vocational and STEM Education System, to name just a couple of the most obvious, there is absolutely no worthwhile national development program, besides the Neo-Fascist Savannah Accelerated Development Authority (SADA) that ended up filthily enriching a few dozen Mahama cronies and associates at the expense of the unspeakably destitute residents and the inhabitants of the Five Northern Regions.

Now, who said congenital thieves like the members of the Mahama and the Johnson “The Mosquito” Asiedu-Nketia Posse can arrest and prosecute themselves for wanton official corruption, as a politically desperate and psychologically unhinged Candidate-General Kwame Gonja would have the rest of the members of the Global Ghanaian Community believe.

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
Oct. 2, 2024
E-mail: [email protected]