Kofi Mensah Mould, the Proper Phrasal Verb Is “Claw Back,” Not “Crawl Black”

His apparent and non-characteristic charitability in wishing his opponents of the massively concussed ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) a robust comeback - obviously a tongue-in-cheek taunt, of course - in the 2028 General Election Season, is very admirable, but it does not tell Ghanaian citizens anything about the stygian economic mess in which the former Executive-Director of the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC) scandalously plunged the then-incoming Akufo-Addo-led government of the New Patriotic Party in 2016 or early 2017, when Mr. Alexander Kofi Mensah Mould signed an unspeakably atrocious and criminally profligate natural gas contract with the government of Equatorial Guinea, a contract that had to be radically plea bargained and significantly reduced by the newly elected President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo.

The aforesaid natural gas contract was in excess of $2.5 billion (USD) and had to be significantly reduced to $1.5 billion (USD), as was revealed at the time by Mr. Kennedy Ohene Agyapong, the recently retired New Patriotic Party’s Member of Parliament for Assin-Central, in the Central Region, to a seismically flabbergasted Ghanaian public. Which is fundamentally why the younger brother of Mrs. Betty Mould-Iddrisu is obviously exaggerating the political reality on the ground, when the half-Ga and Asante-Mampong native smugly makes the claim that the twice, consecutively defeated National Democratic Congress and its Serial and Dynastic Presidential Candidate slipped into opposition for some 8 of the most harrowing years of their existence and have, somehow, managed to “crawl back” from its massive electoral funk or fall by making themselves politically and managerially “fit-for-purpose,” whatever the writer means by this stock phrase.

For exactly what purpose, Ghanaiaans have yet to learn, even as the younger sibling of the first Atta-Mills-appointed Attorney-General and Minister of Justice prepares for another likely gig in the same GNPC boondoggle awaiting this key operative and the Mahama moneybag of another NDC-fangled socioeconomic catastrophe in the offing (See “You Are about to Experience What NDC Went through in 2016 - Alex Mould Warns NPP to Brace for Hardship” Ghanaweb.com 12/12/24).

Actually, what Yours Truly wanted to add to the preceding is the fact that early this year, in his two-day lecture presentation series on the Tamale Campus of the University for Development Studies (UDS), Mr. Martin ABK Amidu trenchantly accused both the late President John Evans Atta-Mills and Mrs. Betty Mould-Iddrisu of having criminally colluded and conspired to dastardly orchestrate what has globally infamously become known as the Alfred Agbesi Woyome Mega-Heist, or simply as “The Woyome Mega-Heist,” entailing the creaming of our National Treasury to the ginormous tune of GH¢ 51.2 million.

Significantly and interestingly as well, this racket of the most heinous and treasonous criminality had been serendipitously uncovered, once again, by Mr. Kennedy Ohene Agyapong, proprietor of the Oman Communications Network and other remarkably prosperous entrepreneurial concerns. Which is why when Mr. Mould “diplomatically” counsels - actually “threatens” is far more like it - that the leadership of the soon-to-be Ghana’s main opposition political party, the New Patriotic Party, to prepare for the excruciatingly painful experience of life outside of government, as experienced by their NDC counterparts over the past 8 years, it becomes crystal clear that the Second John “I Have No Classmates in Ghana” Dramani Mahama regime is highly unlikely to make life any more comfortable for the critical mass of Ghanaian voters, approximately a Million-and-Half in the 2024 General Election, who roundly and, in retrospect, rather unwisely rejected the Mahamudu Bawumia-headed 2024 New Patriotic Party Presidential-Election Campaign.

Or could it just be that Alhaji Iddrisu’s brother-in-law just wanted to “pleasantly” let on to the key operatives of the newly “reset” main opposition New Patriotic Party, that they are about to be put through the metaphorical meat-grinder or the exact same socioeconomic and political squeeze in pretty much the same manner in which the leadership of the GIHOC-dismantling National Democratic Congress had been literally hung out to dry, as it were, by their New Patriotic Party counterparts in Ghana’s winner-takes-all Fourth Republican Political Culture over the past 8 years.

I am also very certain that the Mahamudu Bawumia Camp did not need such a thinly veiled threatening reminder from Mr. Alexander Kofi Mansah Mould, being that this is not the very first time that the leadership of the New Patriotic Party has been plunged or, more accurately, have plunged themselves onto the arid and gray sandblasted margins of opposition political subculture, as it were.

You see, the truth albeit the most painful fact of the matter is that the leadership of the New Patriotic Party has relatively more gruelling experience of being rudely shunted onto the margins of the veritable “Political Ghetto” that is opposition culture than their counterparts of the late former President Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings-fangled National Democratic Congress, largely due to the relative lack of strategic cohesion among the upper-crust leadership of the New Patriotic Party, as most mature and adult Ghanaian citizens and residents painfully witnessed in the runup to the 2008 and the 2012 General Elections, in particular the 2008 and 2012 Presidential Elections.

In the runup to the landmark and the watershed 2024 General Election, too, it was the fractious combination of the strategic lack discipline and inordinate ego-jockeying for peremptory party control that conspicuously ensured, in the memorable words of Mr. Johnson “The Mosquito” Asiedu-Nketia, the present National Chairman of the National Democratic Congress, that the Bawumia-saddled or ridden Elephant would be readily and rapidly stampeded back into the fast-depleting Ghanaian Rainforest. We have yet to fully and dispassionately discuss the fact that Vice-President Bawumia did not help matters or himself by allegedly allowing a Presidential Running-Mate to be literally foisted or imposed on him by a lame-duck President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo.

Which, in effect, also means that he absolutely has himself, and absolutely nobody else, to blame for his tactical and strategically blatant and scandalous error in judgment. Now, I can confidently table the the foregoing statement of observation because I was also one of the staunchest sympathizers of the New Patriotic Party who promptly stepped up to the proverbial plate, in order to ensure that Candidate Bawumia would decide the choice and the selection of his 2024 Presidential Running-Mate squarely on his own terms.

It would shortly turn out, in the scriptural intimations of Prof. Kwesi Yankah that, after all, Candidate Bawumia was not quite as eager and as prepared as his foremost well wishers and political batters to assume bold and courageous responsibility for the highest elective office of The Land. As the tired, old cliché goes: “You may be able to force a horse to the river, but you definitely cannot force it to drink.” In short, the Presidency of our beloved Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana is not for the morbidly and scandalously shy and the faint-hearted. If he is incapable of learning this simple trick and lesson from Kwame Gonja, then, of course, it absolutely goes without saying that there is a diddly little to absolutely nothing that any of us, his most ardent backers, could do to help him become Chief Resident of Jubilee House. We need to move on!!!

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
December 12, 2024
E-mail: [email protected]