Ghanaians Are Still Wedged In-Between a Rock and a Hard Place

For those of our readers who are either too young to remember or are not equipped with this most vital historical knowledge, Ghanaians said similar things in the landmark and the seismic overthrow of the then widely perceived to be the auspicious overthrow of the President Kwame Nkrumah-led government of the Convention People’s Party (CPP), on February 24, 1966, of which the late Mr. Emmanuel Adama Mahama, father of President-Elect John “I Have No Classmates in Ghana” Dramani Mahama, was a key non-cabinet ministerial appointee.

So, no one should be in the least bit surprised to hear a victory-puffed and characteristically intoxicated Yagbonwura Kwame Gonja repeat similar things about the twice, consecutively elected President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo. We are here, of course, alluding to the downright asinine and despicable idea put into the public domain by the man who was twice roundly rejected by Ghanaian voters and citizens that, somehow, the 8 years of the Akufo-Addo-led government of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) was also the very worst of its kind in the annals of postcolonial Ghanaian politics.

The truth of the unarguable reality is that both the Elder and the Younger Monsieurs Mahama have an unenviable and an indelible track record of perpetrating rank official corruption and bribery against the Ghanaian people, in particular northern-born and northern-descended Ghanaian citizens (See “# Election 2024: Eight Years under Akufo-Addo Was One of the Darkest in Ghana’s History - Mahama” Modernghana.com 12/10/24). To be certain, so catastrophically and apocalyptically corrupt was the ministerial stewardship of the late Mr. Emmanuel Adama Mahama that the former Bole-Bamboi elementary school teacher and the first Northern Regional Minister in Ghana’s First Republic had to be removed from office by President Kwame Nkrumah.

A thoroughgoing corrupt Mr. Adama Mahama would be returned to office and his post because in those relatively civically and politically benighted days, the level of literacy and the reach of Modern, Western Missionary-Introduced Formal Education was very low and conspicuously negligible in the Northern Half of the country, that is, the so-called Northern Territories of a newly Independent Ghana.

At any rate, has the Bole-Bamboi native, from the Akufo-Addo-created Savannah Region - and by the way Kwame Gonja had also in his characteristic copycat fashion, promised to create a separate region for his Gonja people but, obviously, did not know how to go about the same - thought about the fact that telling the overwhelming majority of Ghana’s electorate and the citizenry that they twice, consecutively elected the worst President in the history of postcolonial Ghana is scandalously tantamount to a heretical impugnation of the common sense and the intelligence of the very people who, more purely out of desperate and dire economic straits than any enviable governance performance track record achieved by the critic, recently, charitably offered a lachrymose Kwame Gonja a second clearly undeserved shot at the Presidency?

You see, the man whose own then-party General-Secretary sheepishly confessed to a Radio Program Host some 12 years ago, that the 2012 Presidential Election had been criminally and royally rigged by Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan, at the time Chairperson of the Electoral Commission, has yet to practically, creditably and demonstrably prove himself to be the peer and the “classmate” of the man who twice “convincingly” and “emphatically” defeated him in the polls. What with the genocidal bankrupting of the John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor-implemented low-premium National Health Insurance Scheme by the infamous Rawlings-appointed “Shit-Bombing” Communications Minister?

The good news here, however, is that a highly accomplished lame-duck President Akufo-Addo is comfortably vacating Jubilee House, knowing fully well that but for his ingenuity and prompt resuscitation of the National Health Insurance Scheme, a “Cash-and-Carry”-minded elitist and Social Darwinian-minded Kwame Gonja would have been left with absolutely no healthy and sound-minded Ghanaian citizens to earnestly appeal to for a governance mandate, much less be practically assured of comfortably securing such a mandate.

And yet, when he is once again charitably presented with their mandate, rather than hit the ground running, as the tired, old cliché goes, President-Elect John “Nkokonketnkete” Dramani Maham’s first line of action or response is to rudely insult the intelligence of his very kingmakers and queenmakers. As this author has already noted in a previous column, every nation of people get exactly the caliber of leadership that they both wish and ask for with the exercise of their franchise or the delivery of their mandate.

The proverbial warts and all, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo leaves Jubilee House and active politics in Ghana fully and comfortably rest assured that he has educated approximately 10-million able-bodied and talented Ghanaian youths, under his destiny-game-changing Universally Fee-Free Senior High, Technical, Vocational and STEM Education System that Mr. Mahama and his Abongo Boys and Girls of the State-Capturing Looting Brigade of the National Democratic Congress had unconscionably reckoned were not worth the heavy investment capital that had been acquired to significantly improve their lives and, with it, the general socioeconomic status of our beloved Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana.

Today, on the eve of Nana Akufo-Addo’s departure from active political engagement in Ghana, Ghana has been blessed with the very best public school system in the entire ECOWAS Region, while also being proudly ranked as having the Second-Best public school system in the entire Continental African landmass. There are, of course, a legion of other critical social-intervention programs that Nana Akufo-Addo leaves office rest assured his was, indeed, unarguably the best and the most accomplished Fourth-Republican Ghanaian government, if also not the very best postcolonial Ghanaian government.

It goes without saying that Kwame Gonja has every inalienable constitutional right to invoke curses upon his own head and the fortunes of his yet-to-be-established second, nonconsecutively elected government. And already, the man has begun showing very ominous signs that he is poised to perform even far worse than he did before some 8-and-odd years ago. Among Akan-speaking Ghanaian citizens, we have a saying that: “If a woman goes into a marriage with arrogance and haughtiness, symbolized by the thumb, she is bound to receive her divorce papers with a handsome package of dirty slaps.”

We hope President-Elect Kwame Gonja and his rascally gang of double-salary looting team of cabinet and executive appointees are paying studious attention. Not that Yours Truly really cares, anyhow.

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
December 10, 2024
E-mail: [email protected]