Ebenezer! Hearty Congratulations To Vice-President Bawumia

Ordinarily, this column ought to have been composed as a political requiem of sorts. But I have, instead, decided to use this momentous occasion to heartily congratulate the twice, consecutively elected Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia for promptly conceding defeat in an election whose outcome was highly unlikely to be a proverbial cakewalk or a Sunday Walk in the Park, as New Yorkers are wont to say. The ruling party’s candidate had two gigantic albatrosses hanging around his neck, one of which he could easily have averted, namely, a Presidential Running-Mate who brought little to absolutely no redeeming benefit to the ticket, as Yours Truly had long and repeatedly pointed out. In short, it was the abjectly poor and the conspicuously self-destructive decision to force Dr. Matthew Yaw Opoku-Prempeh on Candidate Bawumia, as Prof. Kwesi Yankah rightly and painfully pointed out in one of his numerous articles, that ensured that “Hurricane Bawumia” would not have a landfall.

In a real sense, I am very disappointed but I am not the least bit either flabbergasted or optimistic about the next four years ahead of us as bona fide and patriotic Ghanaian citizens. For as the old wise and common saying goes: “Any people of any nation often get precisely the kind of leadership and government that they hope and ask for.” The present situation is absolutely no different from the norm. It well appears that with the results of Ghana’s December 7, 2024 General Election, in particular the December 7, 2024 Presidential Election, a significant majority of the country’s electorate has decided that they much better prefer Stale and rancid Pittoo and/or Palm-Wine in what fakely parades as a new bottle, or new bottles, to far more potent, antiseptic and politically healthy and morally refreshing brew of Pittoo or freshly-tapped and bottled Palm-Wine.

Which is all well and good, if also because it is their sacred and inalienable constitutional right and choice. The other albatross, of course, was the blunder-prone and pathologically self-absorbed twice-defeated former President John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor-appointed former Attorney-General and Minister of Justice and, subsequently, Minister of Foreign Affairs and ECOWAS Integration. Nevertheless, while I take this prime and most momentous opportunity to heartily congratulate our Outgoing-Vice-President, Alhaji Mahamudu “Issaka”? Bawumia, for promptly and gracefully conceding defeat to a candidate who was hellbent on bulldozing his way into Jubilee House by hook and/or crook, to wit, the twice-rejected, one-term former President and now President-Elect John “I Have No Classmates in Ghana” Dramani Mahama, I am also “inscrutably” compelled to admonish the Oxbridge-educated first-rate economist to seriously reconsider any thought of having the leadership of the crushingly routed and badly listing New Patriotic Party (NPP) regroup so that he could, once again, seek the nomination for the party’s Presidential Candidacy for the second time around (See “Breaking News: We’ll Regroup and Come Back Stronger - Bawumia Concedes Defeat to Mahama” Modernghana.com 12/8/24).

As Americans, in particular New Yorkers, are fond of saying: “There is enough blame to go around” on both sides of the political and the ideological aisle or divide, but in particular among the present leadership of the Advice-Impervious New Patriotic Party, beginning with the suicidally complacent conduct of the NPP’s leadership as a whole but in particular the unarguably cavalier and morbidly self-befuddled and adamantly self-absorbed demeanor of Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo himself, whose flagrant exhibition of the latter morally unsavory and regressive trait found embarrassing expression in his parochial leadership orientation towards the affairs of our beloved Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana, and his nauseatingly flabbergasting inability to sensitize and progressively envisage his leadership mandate as a veritable Corporate Enterprise, rather than his own Private Preferences. Remember: “I am pleased with the performance of my ministers” and executive operatives so far?

No wonder then that many Ghanaians and some of our Francophone ECOWAS neighbors increasingly became impatient with the seemingly pathological Neocolonialist and Neo-Imperialist Orientation of a scandalously Historically Amnesiac President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, one that was strikingly akin to the demeanor of the 18th-Century French Monarch Emperor Louis XVI. Now, there is this famous quote which the legendary and the putative Doyen of Gold Coast and Ghanaian Politics, Dr. J B Danquah, was fond of quoting and likening to the “Proprietary Rule” of a dictatorial President Kwame Nkrumah, which runs as follows: “L’état C’est Moi,” translated into English as “The State Is Me.” This was pretty much the degree of insufferable arrogance and the pathologically self-centeredness that defined the entire 8 years of the Akufo-Addo tenure vis-a-vis the abject lack of the emulative disciplinary conduct of Ghana’s outgoing President and his executive and cabinet appointees, for the most part.

Truth be fearlessly and unabashedly told; which is that this writer has absolutely no hope and confidence in both the immediate predecessor and the immediate successor of President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, to wit, President-Elect John “Nkokonketenkete” Dramani Mahama to appreciably or significantly improve or upgrade the general quality of the health, the education and the living standards of the overwhelming majority of the Ghanaian people. And it is largely and simply because former President and, now, President-Elect John “European Airbus Payola” Dramani Mahama has absolutely no credibly proven performance track record of significantly improving the quality of the living standards of the overwhelming majority of the Ghanaian people.

Besides, at the fast-approaching sunset age of 66 years old - and here, of course, I am thinking about the average Biblical span of human life which is pegged at 70 years old - there is a diddly little in his proverbial bag of tricks to offer the economically privated and desperate Ghanaian people. Which is also why I am inexpressibly grateful to Kwame Gonja’s own “Inscrutable Divine Providence” that having already been domiciled hereabouts the United States of America for Two-Thirds of my life, I am not the least bit condemned to live my adult and mature life and days under the kind of indescribably corrupt and decadent, horrific and the incontrovertibly apocalyptic state of “Near-Nature” existence which the self-styled “Mistakes-Correcting” Comeback Kid and the “Pesky Mosquito” have promised Ghanaians for the next four years, buck-passing fashion.

I shall also, in due course, God willing, be discussing some of the reasons why our Kamala Harris-Perform-Alike Candidate Mahamudu Bawumia may have to completely forget about any serious thought of the possibility of, once again, being selected or elected to lead a “regrouped” New Patriotic Party into another flirtatious misadventure for full and “unmated” occupancy of Jubilee House.

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
December 8, 2024
E-mail: [email protected]