Why Is Cudjoe Silent on the $72 Million USD SSNIT Mahama Heist?

Would an apparently and an evidently “conveniently amnesiac” Mr. Franklin Cudjoe pretend to be totally unaware of the widely publicized lifting of the $72 million (USD) from the Treasury Vaults of the State-Owned and Managed Social Security and National Insurance Trust (SSNIT), by the Serial and the Dynastic Presidential Candidate of the country’s main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), and former President John “I Have No Classmates in Ghana” Dramani Mahama and his then Labor and Employment Minister, Mr. Haruna Iddrisu, in the runup to the 2016 General Election, a treasonous and a felonious crime that may very well have significantly contributed to the seismic loss of the latter year’s Presidential Election by the Bole-Bamboi native from the Akufo-Addo-created Savannah Region?

Which is why it comes as absolutely nothing short of inexcusable hypocrisy for the Founder-President of the Accra-based IMANI-Africa Policy Monitoring and Research Institute to be questioning the rationale behind the resonant and the strategically seismic endorsement of Vice-President Bawumia as the 2024 Presidential Candidate of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) by the twice, consecutively elected former President John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor, because as the officially designated Head of the Government’s Economic Management Team, Vice-President Bawumia contributed to the offering of “dreadful financial haircuts” to approximately 900 retirees and pensioners who were callously and “prematurely driven into their graves” (See “Kufuor has right to choose whoever he wants to lead Ghana but we also deserve to question his choice – Franklin Cudjoe” Modernghana.com 11/18/24).

You see, it is only an “acephalus” or a “headless” think-tanker like the IMANI-Africa President who would so morally and civically irresponsibly suppose that, somehow, the naked robbery of Ghanaian retirees and pensioners, to the ginormous tune of $72 million (USD) had not significantly impacted the SSNIT life-savings of the aforementioned victims. In short, what Mahama media goons like IMANI’s Mr. Cudjoe would have Ghanaians believe is that, somehow, the leaders of the National Democratic Congress are inalienably entitled to extorting the life-savings of hardworking but poorly salaried Ghanaian civil and public servants, but not their counterparts of the presently ruling New Patriotic Party.

Uphill economic challenges and all, at least the overwhelming majority of Ghanaian citizens are assured of two significant social-intervention programs that were practically nonexistent in the country on the eve of the seismic democratic ousting of the previous Mills-Mahama and the Mahama/Amissah-Arthur tandem regimes of the National Democratic Congress, namely, the low-premium Agyekum-Kufuor-established National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), whose funds Ghanaians were reliably informed had been totally embezzled by some key operatives of the Mahama-presided National Democratic Congress, and the Akufo-Addo-implemented and historically unprecedented Universally Fee-Free Senior High, Technical, Vocational and STEM Education System, which a politically clueless and a scandalously elitist and self-serving populist President Mahama had publicly disparaged as a practical impossibility that only existed in the mind of a psychologically unbalanced and a mentally spacy or unhinged career politician hellbent on hoodwinking his way into Jubilee House.

As well, precisely why would IMANI’s Mr. Cudjoe expect a politically astute 85-year-old President Agyekum-Kufuor to endorse the presidential candidacy of a clueless dynastic and nauseatingly recycled, fully salaried retired politician who never really retired from active politics, because he is deliriously and megalomaniacally fixated with being returned to Jubilee House so that he could correct his legion past mistakes, and not because he wants to facilitate the upward mobility of the country in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Digital Technology (DT), into the progress-promising future.

We are also here talking about a hopelessly payola-addicted career politician who has racked up more Judgment Debts at the expense of already debt-overburdened Ghanaian taxpayers than any of the country’s Five, Fourth-Republican Presidents with the least to absolutely nothing materially worthwhile to show for his wanton acts of socially irresponsible leadership. Indeed, if any Ghanaian citizen ought to have his choice of 2024 Presidential-Election Candidate critically examined and/or seriously questioned, and perhaps even his cranial “cream-puff” scrutinized, it is definitely the IMANI-Africa “tank-thinker” pot-bellied man in the mirror, and not the man who, warts and all, decidedly ushered Fourth-Republican Ghana into the Twenty-First Century. Come, Give Your Elders Some Respect, Nyebro Cudjoe “Konkumala”!

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
November 20, 2024
E-mail: [email protected]