You Are Reaping What You Have Sown, Osei Kyei Mensah-Bonsu!

The longtime and the immediate-past New Patriotic Party’s Parliamentary Majority Leader and Kumasi-Suame Member of Parliament, Mr. Osei Kyei Mensah-Bonsu, must be apportioned the brunt of the blame for the flagrant decision by Speaker Alban S. K. Bagbin to literally take the law of the land into his own hands by deliberately misinterpreting Article 97 (1) (g) and (h) of Ghana’s Fourth-Republican Constitution, in order to literally hijack the two-month period left before the conclusion of the twice, consecutively elected tenure of the President, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo (See “We can't ignore Speaker Bagbin's bias towards NDC – Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu” Modernghana.com 10/23/24).

For those of our readers who may not vividly and/or readily remember, it was his unpardonable and morally ignoble decision to privilege his personal friendship with the former National Democratic Congress-sponsored Member of Parliament for the Nadowli-Kaleo Constituency, in the Upper-West Region, that resulted in the very close contest but the otherwise highly unlikely election of the man contemptuously nicknamed “The Parliamentary Methuselah” as Speaker of Ghana’s 8th Parliament. Mr. Mensah-Bonsu would traitorously bring along Mr. Dominic Nitiwul, the Akufo-Addo-named Defense Minister, to vigorously campaign for the seriously endangered Representative Bagbin, a sizeable majority of whose implacably disaffected Nadowli-Kaleo Constituents were on the verge of literally kicking him to the curb, as New Yorkers are wont to say.

In the ensuing process, as Yours Truly vividly recalls, a far better educated and more progressive Parliamentary Candidate approved by the leadership of the New Patriotic Party would be forced to decide against giving the now-Speaker Bagbin the proverbial run for his money. In other words, but for the scandalously unprofessional behavior of Mr. Mensah-Bonsu, the New Patriotic Party would have won at least one additional seat in the august House than it presently has. It was the criminally chuckle-headed and thoroughgoing corrupt Kumasi-Suame Member of Parliament and so-called Minister for Parliamentary Affairs, who despicably allowed his political love affair - And who knows what else? - with Speaker Bagbin to cloud his common sense and to seriously endanger the strength and the stability of the already perennially fractious and the strategically lethargic and criminally complacent leadership of the New Patriotic Party.

An obvious part of the problem is that for reasons best known to the leadership of the proverbial Elephant Party itself, and contrary to well-established age-old tradition, the morbidly complacent leadership of the New Patriotic Party decided to have a non-legally trained Member of the august House take charge of its business, apparently purely out of membership longevity or seniority, rather than professional qualifications or proven competence. And for several years, Yours Truly had been literally screaming his lungs out to have an out-of-his-league Mr. Mensah-Bonsu shuffled to a more suitable position or portfolio but, predictably, all to no avail until it was irredeemably too late.

But for the nick-of-time and genius decision by the newly elected New Patriotic Party’s Parliamentary Majority Leader, Mr. Alexander Afenyo-Markin, there is absolutely no doubt in the mind of this author that the Ju-Jitsu Gambit initiated by Speaker Bagbin and the Asiedu-Nketia-ousted Mr. Haruna Iddrisu would have paid off bigtime, as New Yorkers are wont to say; and there would have been absolutely nothing that the “revolutionarily” ousted Parliamentary Majority Caucus could have done to stop the Mahama Posse from effectively shattering their “8-Breaking Dream.”

We are still not completely out of the woods yet. It is also high time that the leadership of the New Patriotic Party begin behaving like real “boot-for-boot” men and women, and then some, as it were, and stop behaving timorously as if they were not aware of the fact that our Christian God of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv was a Royally Butt-Kicking God, with a Drone and Ballistics Missile-Trapping Iron Dome. In other words, let’s stop fooling ourselves into thinking and believing that, somehow, our cranial cream-puff was wholly composed of dried cassava powder. The Battle is Damn Our Very Own and No One Else’s! After all, when was the first and/or the last time that any of you sent a portion of your “gratuitous” Ex-Gratia Awards to “The Lord”? Now, stop blaspheming, Kukrudu Boys and Girls! Bend your knees down and roll up your sleeves and smell the real scent of the Galamsey Waters of your own rascally and wayward ways. Come on, Wise Up and start thinking like the psychologically mature adults that you have been so stubbornly refusing to become!

*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. 23, 2024
E-mail: [email protected]