What Is So “Farsighted” about Dumsor and Bankrupting National Health Insurance Scheme?

When Yours Truly attended the University of Ghana’s Staff-Village Primary School between 1969 and 1971, pupils with Jumbo-Jet size heads like that of IMANI-Africa’s Franklin Cudjoe were given the nickname of “Double December,” because they were alleged to be carrying the sort of human heads that were scientifically supposed to signify “Nuclear Power”-like cranial capacity although in practice, they tended to rank among the dumbest among the human species. It was this image that flashed through my mind, when I came across the news story captioned “Pre-COVID-19 economic performance not by Bawumia's wizardly, but by Mahama's far-sightedness — Franklin Cudjoe” (Modernghana.com 12/5/24).

He, obviously, must be suffering from a conveniently contracted bad case of “Amnesia,” so the IMANI-Africa Founder and President needs to be reminded of the fact that it was the John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor-led twice, consecutively elected government of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) that bequeathed Ghana with the kind of crude-oil discovery bonanza that the cynically and fraudulently oriented Trokosi Nationalist Goon and Mahama-hired media goon is alleged to have attributed to the previous Mahama regime on social media recently.

The unvarnished and the readily verifiable fact of the matter is that 20 years of the tandem Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings-led junta of the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) and the populist and faux-socialist, kleptocratic Darwinian National Democratic Congress (NDC) did absolutely nothing to discover and create an oil economy for Ghana. If any Ghanaian leader and government could be truthfully said to have bequeathed his and its immediate successor with a robust economy, that leader and government was the Agyekum-Kufuor-led New Patriotic Party. And the most fortunate successor was the late President John Evans Atta-Mills, the very same person that Mr. Martin ABK Amidu, the former Akufo-Addo-appointed Independent Special Prosecutor, early this year, virulently and posthumously accused of having masterminded the GH¢51.2 million Alfred Agbesi Woyome Mega-Heist (See Martin Amidu’s 18th Harmattan Edition UDS Lecture Series, February 7-8, 2024).

If, indeed, the twice-defeated, one-term former President who also doubles as the Monarchical and the Serial and the Dynastic Presidential Candidate of the National Democratic Congress, to wit, Mr. John “I Have No Classmates in Ghana” Dramani Mahama, indeed, managed to leverage President Agyekum-Kufuor’s crude-oil discovery to attract a record-breaking Foreign Direct Investment cash value of $13 billion (USD), it is all the more reason why Candidate Mahama deserves to be roundly and seismically rejected for the third time in the Saturday, December 7, 2024 Presidential Election, being that the Bole-Bamboi native, from the Akufo-Addo-created Savannah Region, also bequeathed Ghanaians with the humongous debt of some $4 billion (USD), in the form of the effective bankrupting of the Agyekum-Kufuor-implemented National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), which a newly elected President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo had to solicit an external loan to promptly resuscitate and make viable once more.

It is therefore unspeakably and inexcusably insulting for a man who embarked on a scorched-earth withdrawal strategy in the wake of his landslide trouncing by then-Candidate Akufo-Addo, in the 2016 Presidential Election, by setting all the National Medical Stores in the country ablaze, to be claiming to have bequeathed the incoming Akufo-Addo Administration with a robust Pre-COVID-19 economy. We are also talking about a President who in 2014 could not even stanch or solve the highly localized outbreak of the Common Cholera that killed at least two dozen students at the University of Cape Coast, cannot be so “pleasantly” accused of having created a robust Pre-COVID Economy out of Dumsor, the perennially erratic supply of electricity, that collapsed more than half of all business enterprises in the country.

It is also inescapably clear that IMANI-Africa’s Mr. Franklin Cudjoe would be much better off explaining precisely the kinds of readily verifiable national development projects that the man who vehemently opposed the landmark Akufo-Addo-implemented Universally Fee-Free Senior High, Technical, Vocational and STEM Education System did with the $13 billion (USD) that he claims to have been attracted into the country by an extant President Mahama. You see, whatever an “Executive of Kosmos Energy has confirmed about John Mahama’s tenure having raked in a $13 billion” investment capital, tells the overwhelming majority of Ghanaian voters absolutely nothing about the humongous debt of the four-and-half years of Dumsor that former President Mahama bequeathed Ghanaian entrepreneurs and taxpayers.

As well, the preceding state of highway robbery tells us absolutely nothing about the approximately $5 billion (USD) that Yagbonwura Okogufuo Kwame Gonja left the present lame-duck Akufo-Addo Administration in a Judgment-Debt Bonanza. Is it therefore any surprise then that IMANI-Africa Vice-President Mr. Kofi Bentil is widely reported to be on the outs with Mr. Franklin Cudjoe over the critical and the politically epochal question of which of the country’s two major 2024 Presidential-Election Contenders better qualifies to succeed the outgoing President Akufo-Addo?

Which also, of course, strikingly recalls what Kenya’s legal maven Prof. P L O Lumumba, not very long ago, said in one of his ever-memorable lectures right here in Accra that: “People like Mr. Franklin Cudjoe do run ‘tanks’ all right. What they almost invariably never do much of is ‘think’.”

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