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What “Progress” Is Kwame Gonja Talking About?

Feature Article What “Progress” Is Kwame Gonja Talking About?
WED, 30 OCT 2024

The speech could very well have been plagiarized from one that had already been composed and presented by Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia, the Oxbridge-educated former Deputy-Governor of the Bank of Ghana, who is widely presumed to be poised to become Ghana’s Next President. We are here talking about the electioneering-campaign address that the twice-rejected, one-term former President John “I Have No Classmates in Ghana” Dramani Mahama is widely reported to have delivered in the Akufo-Addo-created Ahafo Region, in which the Bole-Bamboi native, also from the Akufo-Addo-created Savannah Region, characteristically mendaciously claimed that if the people of the Ahafo Region wanted to see and experience significant progress and development, then they needed “to reconsider their political allegiance and support the NDC in the upcoming elections” (See “Look beyond party affiliation in 2024 elections – Mahama to NPP supporters” Modernghana.com 9/24/24).

I could not help laughing myself, literally, off my chair and falling smack onto the shellacked and uncarpeted floor of my living-room. I also wondered whether the infamous Rawlings-appointed “Shit-Bombing” Communications Minister supposed that, somehow, the good and the hardworking people of the Ahafo Region were afflicted with acute amnesia as well as clinical dementia, especially when the Serial and the Dynastic Presidential Candidate of the country’s main opposition National Democratic Congress also peevishly claimed that under the previous tandem Mills-Mahama regime, more colleges of education had been constructed in 2015 alone than under 8 years of the Akufo-Addo Presidency.

Now, let us also not forget that this is the President who ran a three-year Senior High School System on grounds that the country was too strapped for cash to be able to afford the standard four-year Senior High School System, and that the primary objective for the establishment of his Three-Year High School System was, at any rate, to prepare young women for the booming “Ghanaian Marriage Market.” Now, Dear Reader, how does one square up the construction and the establishment of a High School System that aims to prepare young women for the “Marriage Market,” with the establishment of Teacher-Training Colleges around the country in the single year of 2015?

To better appreciate matters more fully, one needs to bear in mind the fact that during the seasonally unprecedented four-and-half years that Mr. Mahama held the democratic reins of government, only a statistically marginal number of some 40 Senior High Schools had been constructed out of the 200 promised by the grossly incompetent protege of the late former President Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings; and even out of the 40 schools or physical plants completed by the previous ragtag regime of the National Democratic Congress, only a statistically negligible 25 schools could actually be truthfully said to have been finished and ready to be immediately occupied by any class of high schoolers, with the rest of these physical plant facilities woefully lacking even basic furniture, much less state-of-the-art fiber-optic wiring for the use of the most up-to-date teaching or instructional materials.

Now, couple the preceding with the fact that it was the then President Mahama and his own Minister of Education at the time, to wit, the now-Mahama Presidential Running-Mate, Prof. Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang, who summarily and callously canceled the age-old Teacher-Trainee Allowance, a critical social-intervention fiscal support system for the children and the grandchildren of the kind of audience that the twice-rejected former President addressed in his Ahafo Region electioneering-campaign speech, and it becomes at once unarguably clear that the 2024 Presidential Candidate of the National Democratic Congress woefully lacks the credibility and the moral authority required to become President of a serious nation like our beloved Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana.

At any rate, if he had, indeed, achieved all the national development feats that he told the people of the Ahafo Region that his previous government had achieved, would it also have become necessary for the man the leadership of whose own political party thoroughly destroyed the seminal industrial base of the country, by completely dismantling the Kwame Nkrumah-established Ghana Industrial Holdings Corporation (GIHOC), have had any need to mischievously attempt to hoodwink the Ahafo people into facilely forgetting about their respective political party affiliations so as to unwisely cast their ballots for him in the upcoming watershed 2024 Presidential Election?

You see absolutely nowhere in the civilized world have patriotic and well-meaning leaders and socioeconomically responsible politicians ever led the kind of morally unspeakable “primitive revolution” that led to the total dismantling and the destruction of their country’s seminal industrial apparatus, such as the Kwame Nkrumah-established Ghana Industrial Holdings Corporation, only to shamelessly and unconscionably turn around to promise the very people whose livelihood they have so stupidly upended and thoroughly destroyed livable-wage jobs?

Maybe somebody needs to remind political dunces and chuckleheads like members of the Mahama and the Johnson “The Mosquito” Asiedu-Nketia Posse that one does not embark on nation-building destroying the very economic-development basis of that same nation. And by the way, isn’t it also downright criminally absurd that on December 31, 2015, the same day and moment that the now-Candidate Mahama claims to have definitively resolved the perennial scourge of Dunsor, was also the very same day and moment that the then President Mahama literally forced his custom-tailored Power Minister, Dr. Kwabena Donkor, to resign his latter portfolio and render unqualified apology to the Ghanaian people for having miserably failed to resolve the chronic and protracted cancer of Dumsor? Does the preceding make any sense to the 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
Oct. 21, 2024
E-mail: [email protected]

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