Is John Mahama Cursing Ghanaians with Another Promise of Dumsor Return?

In the recent past, both the twice-rejected, one-term former President John “I Have No Classmates in Ghana” Dramani Mahama and his two-time Presidential Running-Mate, Candidate Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang, in a thinly veiled threat, warned Teacher- and Nurse-Trainees, among other state-sponsored professional trainees, that in the highly unlikely event of the National Democratic Congress’ being returned to power, the infamous Satanic Pair intended to charitably allow these former victims of summarily revoked professional-training allowances to keep their Akufo-Addo and Bawumia restored professional-trainee allowances for at most twelve (12) months or one academic year, after which these Nation-Building First-Responders would be rudely ordered to individually or severally seek bank loans to fend for themselves or tide themselves over.

So, it was quite amusing to hear the Serial and the Dynastic Presidential Candidate of the country’s main opposition political party, the National Democratic Congress (NDC), tell some Teacher Trainees in the Akufo-Addo-created Ahafo Region, that the same abrogator of the same age-old professional trainee allowances intended to ensure that these criminally savaged victims of NDC extortion received their allowances on time or around the clock under the next Mahama regime. Absolutely no wonder then, that even well before Candidate Mahama had finished making this intellectually insulting promise, nearly half of his audience of disaffected Teacher Trainees had begun to sidle away with what clearly appeared to be palpable disdain and utmost disinterest.

Here in the United States, demagogic politicians like Candidates Mahama and Opoku-Agyemang are routinely likened to broken vinyl phonograph record plates. Their empty promises have become so meaningless that they have virtually become indistinguishable from ordinary animal noises. Recently, though, Candidate Mahama well appears to be sobering up and coming to the grim and laudably painful realization that he is an effectively and a decidedly spent political force who has absolutely no worthwhile plan or agenda to significantly improve the quality of the living standards of the overwhelming majority of Ghanaian citizens and the electorate, short of racking up more debts at the expense of taxpayers and posterity.

So, he has characteristically and cynically begun accusing the present lame-duck Akufo-Addo Administration of packing up humongous debts in the energy sector, to the whopping tune of at least $2 billion (USD), which the former Attorney-General and Minister of Justice deliberately hopes to bequeath to a purportedly incoming National Democratic Congress-sponsored government, in hopes of “sandbagging” the self-proclaimed “Past-Mistakes-Correcting” imminent Second Mahama Government, in hopes of sabotaging the latter right from its very inception. Now, no such claim and/or accusation could be at once more outrageous and mendacious, since Candidate Mahama has also been campaigning across all 16 Administrative Regions of the country, claiming that the lame-duck President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo was hellbent on handing over the democratic reins of governance to absolutely no one else but his first-rate, Oxbridge-educated Vice-President from Walewale, in the Akufo-Addo-created North-East Region.

Now, does it really make any sense to any reasonably well-educated Ghanaian citizen and an eligible and/or registered voter that a lame-duck President who is hellbent on handing over the democratic reins of governance to his much-touted and lauded Arch-Lieutenant would also stick to the latter, a humongous debt tab in excess of $2 billion (USD), if the aforementioned lame-duck President is also determined to ensure the resonant success of his dedicated and “faultfully loyal” Presidential Driver’s Mate? (See “Akufo-Addo's government 'hiding' power crisis to pass it over to NDC with estimated US$2bn debt – Mahama” Modernghana.com 11/5/24).

But what is even more farcical with Candidate Mahama’s kind of warped logic is the unarguable fact that it boldly and egregiously contradicts his perennially insistent claim to have effectively and definitively resolved the problem of Dumsor, that is, the temporally protracted and erratic supply of electricity or energy in the country, prior to reluctantly handing over the democratic reins of governance to Nana Akufo-Addo on January 7, 2017, when as relatively far back as December 31, 2015, an implacably disappointed President Mahama had summarily fired from his cabinet Dr. Kwabena Donkor, the conjugal in-law for whom the former had custom-tailored the functionally superfluous Power Ministry, when the extant President also had a Minister for Energy and Petroleum Resources. Now, let’s talk about “Family and Friends’ Government.”

In recent weeks, a politically desperate Candidate Mahama has been shamelessly and literally lying through his dentures to the nation that his government left a debt bill of GH¢ 120 billion to the incoming Akufo-Addo Administration and that the lame-duck Akufo-Addo Administration has already racked up in excess of GH¢700 billion that it intended to bequeath to the purportedly incoming Mahama regime. What the pathologically kleptocratic Candidate Mahama conveniently ignores to tell Ghanaians is the fact that the tandem Mills-Mahama regimes of the National Democratic Congress left behind a ginormous Judgment-Debt tab or bill in excess of $3 billion (USD), in the form of the complete and the total bankrupting of the John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor-established low-premium National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), which Nana Akufo-Addo had to promptly reactivate with a loan in excess of $2 billion (USD) and another tranche of loan to replenish the $72 million (USD), which an extant President Mahama and his Labor and Employment Minister, Mr. Haruna Iddrisu, literally lifted from the vaults of the state-run Social Security and National Insurance Trust (SSNIT) for their own criminally thievish purposes.

This SSNIT Heist was money comprising the life-savings of Ghanaian retirees and actively engaged civil and public servants, as well as money belonging to self-employed and private entrepreneurs. In short, contrary to what the Tema-Harbor Mortgaging Mahama and the Johnson “The Mosquito” Asiedu-Nketia Posse would have the rest of the nation and the global Ghanaian community believe, the previous Mahama regime left Ghanaians a humongous debt in excess of GH¢3 Trillion, and not a diddly GH¢120 billion, when one also factors the total and the abject lack of a Fee-Free Senior High, Technical, Vocational and STEM Education System into account.

As of this writing, the African Business Magazine had reported that the present quality of Ghana’s public school system and Ghana’s public system of education ranked Number Two on the African Continent as a whole, and was only second to that of the Democratic Arab Republic of Tunisia. Significantly, under the previous tandem Mills-Mahama regimes of the National Democratic Congress, whose main focus had been “The Preparation of Young Men and Women, in Particular, for the ‘Fiscally Fetching’ Ghanaian Marriage Market,” as Ms. Akua Sena Dansua, the Mills-Mahama-appointed Women, Children and Gender Protection Minister, told a catatonically flabbergasted nation, Ghana presided over one of the very worst systems of public education in the world (See the OECD Ranking of Ghanaian Public Education System, from 2009 through 2016).

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
Nov. 5, 2024
E-mail: [email protected]