Election 2024 Is about Change, Not the Recycling of Failed Former Presidents

He ought to have taken his empty and hollow grievances to the mole which the twice-rejected, one-term former President John “I Have No Classmates in Ghana” Dramani Mahama and Mr. Kofi Adams, the National Democratic Congress-sponsored Oti Region’s Parliamentarian and former Rawlings errand boy, themselves, planted among the inner-circle cordon and core of Akufo-Addo appointees and operatives, instead of “innocently” pretending that, somehow, Mr. Gabriel “Gabby” Asare Otchere-Darko, the notorious sometime Akufo-Addo bouncer cousin and fork-tongued internal detractor of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP), were his real political opponent.

After all, hasn’t Mr. Otchere-Darko already categorically and smugly made it publicly known that the latter and the Bole-Bamboi native, from the Akufo-Addo-created Savannah Region, have been bosom friends ever since Kwame Gonja - as the former President is also widely and popularly known - became the National Democratic Congress-sponsored Member of Parliament for West-Gonja Constituency? Which, of course, was to emphatically remind those of us who still think and believe that “Gabby” Otchere-Darko has not been dealing straight and upfront with Cousin Kwaku Willie, that oftentimes some fast friendships are even more intimate and significant than familial kinship and blood ties (See “Election 2024 is about change, not interchanges – Mahama slams 'Commissioner General' Akufo-Addo” Modernghana.com 11/29/24).

Of course, Election 2024 is about change; but it is about the sort of POSITIVE CHANGE or PROGRESSIVE CHANGE whose criteria for qualification a fourth-rate and a visionless Candidate-General John “Gnassingbe” (European Airbus SE Payola) Dramani Mahama unarguably does not meet, unless, of course, such change also, ironically, includes the reckless recycling of tired and politically exhausted and effete nation-wreckers like the GIHOC-Dismantling and infamous “Shit-Bombing” Rawlings-appointed Communications Minister.

The widely rumored “Palace Assassin” of the late President John Evans Atta-Mills also has every inalienable right to insult the intelligence of registered and eligible Ghanaian voters all he wants, as he has already been recklessly and incessantly doing for quite a considerable while now. There will, of course, be “Payback Time” at the polling booth in less than a week from now.

But one thing that must be made crystal clear to the man whom the widow of the late former Vice-President Paa Kwesi Bekoe Amissah-Arthur virulently accused of having treated her husband like the Mahama Family Dog at Jubilee House, must rest assured that Ghanaians perfectly well know what REAL CHANGE MEANS; and that, first of all, REAL CHANGE DOES NOT SCANDALOUSLY MEAN POURING STALE, GALAMSEY-POLLUTED PITOO AND/OR PALM-WINE INTO NEW BOTTLES. No such cavalier supposition or presumption could be more morally and politically insulting to the intelligence of the overwhelming majority of Ghana’s electorate and the citizenry at large.

Now , has the Sakasaka Elementary and Middle School Graduate also thought about the fact that the overwhelming majority of Ghanaian citizens are looking forward to the sort of human-resource capacity development of the sort being progressively and successfully and palpably championed by Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia, the widely presumed Next President of our beloved Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana, which recently witnessed the glorious and “the Divinely Scrutable” graduation of some 22 Female Head-Porters or Kayayei as Professionally Certified Commercial Motorists or Drivers in the Greater-Accra Metropolis recently?

These are the very same economically deprived but, nonetheless, diligent and generously talented largely northern-descended young women whose hitherto miserable existence the self-proclaimed “North Star” further complicated by distributing headpans to not very long ago. You see, what the Serial and the Dynastic Presidential Candidate of the country main opposition National Democratic Congress clearly and adamantly fails and/or refuses to appreciate is that, when we talk of “Infrastructure” or “Infrastructural” Development, Development Experts are referring to much, much more than simple and common rain-washable road construction. Rather, the reference here is to “Human-Resource Capacity Development such as the landmark and the historically unprecedented Akufo-Addo-implemented Universally Fee-Free Senior High, Technical, Vocational and STEM Education System which an extant President Mahama fiercely and narcissistically and egotistically opposed and publicly disparaged as a practical impossibility that only existed in the minds of clinically insane and megalomaniacal politicians out to grab power by hook and/or crook.

As well, prioritizing one’s vaulting presidential ambition, such as one’s avid desire to go back to Jubilee House so that one “can correct one’s past mistakes,” rather than move the entire country significantly higher up on the global development ladder, ought to be more than enough of a good reason for Ghanaian voters to immediately and effectively send Candidate-General John “I Have No Classmates in Ghana” Dramani Mahama who, by the way, is still receiving the full salary of a Retired President, even while he has been actively engaged in Presidential Politics, packing bag and baggage into final and permanent retirement to Bole-Bamboi, to learn how to farm and feed himself and his cousin Joyce Bawa Mogtari.

In short, Candidate-General Mahama is a drain on the fiscal resources of Ghanaian taxpayers. He is a parasite with the appetite of a whale, with a gullet and a stomach capacity large enough to swallow four elephants in one fell swoop! That is the problem behind his insatiable addiction to bribery and corruption, as the late former President Rawlings authoritatively once observed.

Finally, if, indeed, as Candidate-General John “Gnassingbe” Dramani Mahama claims, the upcoming December 7, 2024 Presidential Election is squarely about “unemployment and economic hardship,” then let somebody among the vanguard ranks of his own political party, namely, the National Democratic Congress, inform this scandalously disconnected career politician that the Four-and-Half Years of Dumsor during which he callously and unconscionably switched off the lights did not create an employment bonanza, much less an economic boom or Golden Age in the country. Now, Dear Reader, who is ready to bell the cat?

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]