Mahama Cheapens Ghana Armed Forces by Wearing Military Uniforms as a Civilian Commander-in-Chief

Recently, it has been the lame-duck twice, consecutively elected President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo who has come up for upbraiding and much public scoring for allowing a life-size gold-glazed bronze statue to be sculpted and mounted in his honor and memory at the Effia-Nkwanta Regional Hospital in the Twin-Cities of Sekondi-Takoradi, in the Akufo-Addo-trimmed Western Region. Akufo-Addo-trimmed Western Region because it was the former New Patriotic Party’s Member of Parliament for Akyem-Abuakwa-South, in the Eastern Region, who created the Western-North Region out of the old rather geographically amorphous and unwieldy, relatively speaking, of course, Western Region.

Aside from resuscitating the John “I Have No Classmates in Ghana” Dramani Mahama-bankrupted John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor-implemented low-premium National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), which both the late President John Evans Atta-Mills and the now-Candidate-General John “European Airbus SE Payola” Dramani Mahama pooh-poohed as a practical impossibility, to-date, with more than $4 billion (USD), Nana Akufo-Addo would also implement the historically unprecedented Universally Fee-Free Senior High, Technical, Vocational and STEM Education System, which the Atta-Mills and the Mahama Posse also publicly disparaged as a practical impossibility that only existed in the hallucinogenic imagination of a career politician hellbent on grabbing power by hook and/or crook.

Now, couple the preceding with the fact of Nana Akufo-Addo’s having expanded Ghana’s former 10 Administrative Regions with the addition of 6 more popularly demanded Administrative Regions, and it immediately becomes crystal clear that if any presently living Ghanaian leader deserves a life-size statue sculpted in their name, major flaws and foibles and all, it is none other than the short and stocky or pudgy man from Akyem-Abomosu and Kyebi whom the late Chairman Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings, later President, described as damn too short of a personality to accede to the august Presidency of the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana.

In sum, Nana Akufo-Addo, the self-described “Big Thinker,” has more than amply demonstrated that it only takes a rich and a creative brain and imagination to significantly build a nation and to seismically upgrade the living standards of the ordinary citizenry. Under the leadership of the Legendary Architect of The Repeal of the Criminal Libel Law, the old Britain-bequeathed colonial legal instrument of torture and political repression, Ghana’s public education system has phenomenally and exponentially advanced from being ranked among the very worst in the world to being among the very best of its kind in Postcolonial Africa.

Currently, Ghana’s public education system ranks as the Second Best on the African Continent, second only to the public education system of the relatively much smaller Democratic Arab Republic of Tunisia, as widely reported, recently, by the African Business Insider Magazine. On the other hand, under the ministerial stewardship of the now Vice-Presidential Candidate of the country’s main opposition party, the National Democratic Congress, namely, Prof. Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang, Ghana’s public education system was ranked 145th among some 145 countries surveyed around the world between 2010 and 2017 by the Paris-, France, based globally renowned and respected think-tank called the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

So, it is more than quite obvious that Ghanaian voters would be committing an irreversible political and socioeconomic suicide, if they make the egregious error of returning to Jubilee House the man whose topmost priority and agenda for gunning for the Presidency, after he has been seismically and twice consecutively rejected by the overwhelming majority of Ghanaian voters, is to literally turn back the National-Development Clock of Ghana, so that “He could correct his past mistakes.”

Now, isn’t it unspeakably blasphemous for a pathologically narcissistic Serial and Dynastic Candidate-General John “Gnassingbe” (Ouagadougou Ford Expedition Payola) Dramani Mahama to cavalierly suppose his parochial and personal political ambition to be of far greater significance than the pressing needs and the aspirations of some 35-million Ghanaians across all walks of life in the 16 regions of the country? Let the Dear Reader also ponder this matter and its dire and deleterious implications and consequences critically and then make the kind of intelligent political decision that is more apt to move the country at least a notch or two up the global socioeconomic development ladder.

Finally, on the question of any practical role played by the passionately pro-National Democratic Congress-sponsored Radio Gold - call it Radio Havana - vis-a-vis the skin-of-teeth victory clinched by the then former Vice-President Atta-Mills, late, over Candidate Akufo-Addo in the 2008 Presidential Election, the latter is better, if not best, answered by the rank division and the highly charged atmosphere of factional hostilities that existed among the ranks of the vanguard operatives of the then-ruling New Patriotic Party which were literally bursting at the seams, and whose equally parochially minded, implacably vindictive and self-serving lame-duck leader, President Agyekum-Kufuor, was widely known to be dead-set against the practical actualization of an Akufo-Addo Presidency.

Not very long ago, for example, Mr. Agyekum-Kufuor’s former Presidential Chief-of-Staff and old Prempeh College mate and bosom buddy, Mr. Kwadwo Mpiani, gave an authoritative public testimony in support of the version of the narrative presented by this author in the foregoing paragraph, so there is absolutely no need to rehash the quiddities of Mr. Mpiani’s practically unimpeachable version of the story which, it is significant to note, emphatically contradicts the sort of “Radio Gold Mythology” being so characteristically self-deceptively peddled by Dr. Valerie Sawyerr (See “Ghana Election 2024: NPP Must Fall on December 7 - Valerie Sawyerr” Graphic Online 11/29/24). In sum, it was an outgoing President Agyekum-Kufuor who singularly and uniquely scuttled the presidential ambition of Candidate Akufo-Addo in 2008, and not the infamous Ahwoi Brothers, contrary to what the likes of Dr. Valerie Sawyerr would have the rest of us believe.

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
November 29, 2024
E-mail: [email protected]