General Mosquito Now Has His Nation-Wrecking Wish

In the wake of the clinching of what one sore-loser and a New Patriotic Party (NPP) renegade and former stalwart vengefully described as the “emphatic victory” of Ghana’s main opposition party, the National Democratic Congress (NDC), in last week Saturday’s General Election, I chanced across a news item, as Nigerian journalists and newscasters are fond of saying, in which the National Chairman of the newly elected National Democratic Congress was reported to have vowed to launch a lawsuit against any media organization or establishment whose publication has made the quite legitimate claim that the superannuated graduate of the Senior-Staff College of the Ghana Armed Forces has threatened to cause the effective scrapping or abolition of the President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo-implemented landmark Universally Fee-Free Senior High, Technical, Vocational and STEM Education System in the event of the late Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings-founded ideological establishment resuming the democratic reins of governance (See “Asiedu Nketia Threatens Legal Action Against Media Houses Playing Doctored Free SHS Videotape” Modernghana.com 11/27/24).

Instead, the former Rawlings-appointed Deputy Defense Minister told the good people of Atasemanso, in the Asante Region, while on an electioneering-campaign stop, that what he had actually said was that a soon-to-be-elected National Democratic Congress’ government intended to scrap the double-track system that had enabled close to 8-million Ghanaian youths to attend school all-year-round. In the dubious opinion of the former junior high school teacher in Seikwa Township, in the Bono Region, that scrapping the double-track system of the Akufo-Addo-implemented SHS System would significantly enhance the quality of the country’s public education system which, by the way, the leadership of the infamously anti-intellectual National Democratic Congress completely bankrupted in the previous 8 years of the Mills-Mahama and the Mahama/Amissah-Arthur-led tandem regimes of the National Democratic Congress.

Now, what is significant to critically observe here is that the longest-serving General-Secretary of the latter populist and elitist faux-socialist political party does not tell Ghanaians exactly how the recently elected or reelected second Mahama government intended to create adequate physical plant facilities or school buildings to accommodate the massive overflow of talented and intellectually and vocationally competent young men and women, about a Quarter-Million annually, who had been completely shut out of the old system that woefully lacked adequate physical plant facilities.

At least with the present double-track system, as the outgoing Education Minister, Dr. Yaw Osei-Adutwum, recently pointed out, the available facilities are fully in use throughout the year, which means that the kind of fiscal waste that results during the traditional long vacations has now been significantly reduced. Unless the Prime or Foremost Kingmaker of the National Democratic Congress was raised or grew up in a small village where the available school physical plant facilities were far more spacious and/or capacious than the number of students in attendance, the double-track system has been in place ever since this writer can remember.

You see, the major problem with the Mahama and the Asiedu-Nketia Posse is the fact that this group of kleptocratic and State-Capturing politicians are damn too pathologically cynical and self-righteous that they find it extremely difficult and nigh impossible to acknowledge the inimitably impressive governance performance record of their arch-rivals and main political opponents of the just-unseated New Patriotic Party to be almost politically suicidal. Now, though, they have been granted their long-wished-for chance to, once again, assume full occupancy of the boardrooms and the executive suites of Jubilee House.

Now, they have no excuses to provide Ghanaian citizens and the electorate as to why in the glaring and the conspicuous absence of any COVID-19 kind of economically impactful global pandemic or criminal wars of occupation, such as that which is being presently relentlessly and inexorably waged by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, these National Democratic Congress’ leaders can still not functionally maintain, much less significantly improve or upgrade the John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor-implemented low-premium National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) and the Akufo-Addo-implemented Universally Fee-Free Senior High School System, the preceding of which actually makes the massive loss of the 2024 General Election by a characteristically and a scandalously complacent New Patriotic Party leadership almost appear to be a blessing in disguise opportunely proffered by Yagbonwura Kwame Gonja’s “Inscrutable Divine Providence.”

We shall also be studiously paying attention to how the cedi performs against the US dollar under the watch of the second Mahama-led government of the National Democratic Congress, in particular the fact of whether this time around, “The Fundamentals of Ghana’s Economy” are apt to strongly improve over and above its magnitude of the woeful and the abject lack thereof under the present and soon-to-be-gone Akufo-Addo government. Here is where matters stand right now.

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
December 9, 2024
E-mail: [email protected]