Brother Musah, Vice-President Bawumia Was Integral to the Problem of the Blunder-Driven Akufo-Addo Government

It will take a little while before deeply disappointed and, some would even say, traumatized stalwarts of the seismically and apocalyptically defeated ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) come to a sobering realization of the fact that Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia was equally complicit and fully responsible for the December 7 General Election defeat of the twice, consecutively elected Akufo-Addo-led government of the New Patriotic Party (See “#Election2024: Bawumia was 'punished for the sins of 'unapologetically nepotistic' Akufo-Addo – Musah Superior” Modernghana.com 12/10/24).

If, indeed, as the foregoing parenthetically captioned tirade of Mr. Musah Superior indicates, a lame-duck President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo was “unapologetically nepotistic” in the way that he governed the country over the course of the past 8 years, it was also unarguably because the widely perceived political culture of rank corruption and nepotism had long been firmly established and cynically approved at the highest levels of our governance institutional structure well before the renowned Human and Civil Rights Activist and Campaigner arrived on Ghana’s political landscape. Remember the John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor-minted mantra of “Corruption is as ancient as Adam and Eve,” the first Christocentric parents of humanity?

Consequently, having fully and actively participated in Mr. Agyekum-Kufuor’s government of the twice, consecutively elected New Patriotic Party, first, as the proverbial Gentle Giant’s first-appointed Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, and later as Ghana’s Foreign Minister and Minister of ECOWAS Integration, Nana Akufo-Addo had had a first-hand and a first-rate experience of the shameless “Asantefication” and the “unapologetic” packing of the Agyekum-Kufuor cabinet with “friends and family members” of the conspicuously and predominantly Asante-Subethnic group or polity of an extant President Agyekum-Kufuor.

And, of course, once such a morally ignoble and politically execrable precedent is brazenly set, it becomes extremely difficult and nigh impossible to condemn and reverse such socioeconomically and politically divisive and invidious policy agenda. In the case of Nana Akufo-Addo, who had disconsolately witnessed the systematic “Akyem-Cleansing” from the Agyekum-Kufuor cabinet, with the former being at one point the only and sole significant Akyem-descended major cabinet operative in the second Agyekum-Kufuor administration, going ethnocentrically ballistic in favor of the indiscriminate packing of the Akufo-Addo cabinet with Akyem-descended party stalwarts and citizens, once he had been entrusted with the hard-won democratic mandate of the people, became just an unquestionable corrective matter of the progressive implementation of an unspoken policy of reverse discrimination.

The success of this policy of “positive” or “progressive” nepotism became a resonant success, being also that the Akyem themselves and some of their non-Akyem allies came to perceive the Akufo-Addo Presidency as divinely ordained opportunity for the relatively marginalized but far better educated Akyem, at least in relation to their more populous and politically dominant Asante kinsmen and women, as well as members of a critical mass of other Akan and non-Akan sub-ethnic groups and subpolities, to promptly and radically rectify such deliberately and dastardly calculated and punitively constructed severe underrepresentation of the Akyem in the upper-echelons of the governments of both the New Patriotic Party and the National Democratic Congress over the course of several decades and generations. In the estimation of the so-called Akyem Mafia Cabal or the Kyebi Mafia, therefore, the brazen practice of such conspicuously rank and blatant nepotism became all the more acceptable and even morally kosher.

You may have even heard Mr. Kennedy Ohene Agyapong sneeringly challenge the now-President-Elect John “Ford Expedition Payola” Dramani Mahama to produce a list of people from his Gonja family and clan who were as academically and professionally qualified as the Akufo-Addo relatives who had been given ministerial and executive portfolios in the government of the former New Patriotic Party’s Member of Parliament for Akyem-Abuakwa-South. Of course, it goes without saying that the Dauphin of the late Non-Executive Ceremonial former President Edward Akufo-Addo needed to have played it “diplomatically” safe and suavely, if he was ever to accede to the highest office of the land, amidst the seismic tidal wave of internecine mutuality of implacable animus between the party’s powerful faction of partisans of our proverbial “Gentle Giant” and the almost equally influential, if not fairly equally powerful, faction of the legendary Leprechaun of Kyebi and Akyem-Abomosu.

In other words, the complex concatenation of factional infighting and rancorous shenanigans that got the Elephant thus far is a baneful phenomenon that could obviously very well have shattered the Eagle-Squat Umbrella Party a thousand times over. This is what most virulently anti-Akufo-Addo tirades and even the most objective critical analyses of the inescapably maverick and inexorably transgressive deportment and conduct of “The Little Man from Kyebi,” as one former Akufo-Addo protégé once disdainfully described our lame-duck President, glaringly fail to adequately take into account so as to craft or limn the most credible portrait of the man who has almost invariably been described as being insufferably presumptuous, to speak much less about sheer and raw arrogance and pathological self-absorption.

Now, the real problem that a masterful mind like Mr. Musah Superior, the former Akufo-Addo-appointed Tamale Metropolitan Chief Executive Officer, has in taking on the admittedly volatile and politically protean and rambunctious albeit erratically predictable firebrand and blunder-prone politician, is the fact that nearly every key party player or operative who has had the fortune or the misfortune to directly interact and collaborate with the man is almost invariably fully and painfully aware of the fact that with “Nana Akufo-Addo the Play Man,” as the recently deceased Great Nana Akua Donkor, Founder and Presidential Candidate of the Ghana Freedom Party (GFP), was fond of calling her fellow short and stocky friend and the politician she had once implacably loved to hate and publicly disparage and asperse, a la the strategic ruse and political baiting of Kwame Gonja - Now, let’s talk about Divine Providence Setting a Table before One’s Enemies - one gets exactly and precisely whatever one has bargained for.

For example, commissioning one last-minute completed project after another, as Brother Musah Superior righteously accuses a lame-duck President Akufo-Addo of having done in the runup to the December 7, 2024 General Election, is perfectly smack on target. The problem here, though, is that such egregious strategic and tactical error had not prevented a “great” and “an intellectually astute” Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia from following suit in “Monkey See, Monkey Do” fashion, as was widely reported by the media regarding the Vice-President’s ditto commissioning of an Electronic Gate at the John “The Nkokonketenkete-Distributing” Dramani Mahama-constructed Terminal 3 at the Kotoka International Airport.

As well, in the case of the 90 New Patriotic Party Members of Parliament who swamped Nana Akufo-Addo’s Presidential Suite at Jubilee House to demand the immediate removal of an abjectly poorly performing Finance Minister, to wit, Mr. Kenneth Ofori-Atta, the Akufo-Addo cousin, it was Mr. Osei Kyei Mensah-Bonsu, the New Patriotic Party Parliamentary Majority Caucus’ Leader and the Akufo-Addo-appointed Parliamentary Affairs Minister, who tactically and strategically stalled and systematically sabotaged his own jittery peers and colleagues of our august House of Parliament or National Assembly, until the eventual removal of Mr. Ofori-Atta had been rendered functionally and decidedly defective and superfluous, and then to have President Akufo-Addo even further elevate an epically failed Mr. Ofori-Addo to the much higher “super-portfolio” of supervising international loan solicitation and fiscal transactions for the government and the country!

Meanwhile, a morally and a politically principled Vice-President Bawumia who could and should have resolutely and promptly tendered his official resignation to the Presidency and concentrated on running his 2024 Presidential-Election Campaign, which could almost definitely and immediately have forced a “pathologically nepotistic” Nana Akufo-Addo to fire a forensically proven kleptocratic and nation-wrecking Mr. Ofori-Atta, at least per the findings of then Independent Special Prosecutor Martin ABK Amidu, decided to docilely play it “dumb,” “safe” and “idiotic,” in quixotic hopes of remaining in the good books of the clinically narcissistic and incurably self-absorbed man who literally elevated him from his second-bananas status and relative obscurity at the Bank of Ghana to make him his 2008, 2012 and 2016 Presidential Running-Mate, against vehement and strategically withering protestations from the Agyekum-Kufuor, Mpiani and the Kyerematen Faction of the New Patriotic Party.

In short, as paradoxical and oxymoronic as this may sound, it is rather the soon-to-be former President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo who aptly meets the required qualifications of being a “great” and an “astute” leader and politician, however indescribably and/or unspeakably flawed he may be envisaged to be in terms of character profile. After all, isn’t our kind and brand of political culture as repulsive and dirty as those ragamuffin gang of National Democratic Congress-sponsored thugs and so-called foot-soldiers who were widely reported to be violently and bestially fighting over the keys to some neighborhood latrine or pay-for-use public toilet facilities, just as I commenced composing this column last night?

Ditto the E-Levy debacle and futuristic budgetary scam. The truth of the matter is that at 60 years old, Alhaji Mahamudu Bawumia is more than old enough to be elected President-Plenipotentiary of our beloved Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana. In short, if the Walewale native, from the Akufo-Addo-created North-East Region cannot stand up to be counted like a mature and a civically and a politically responsible adult bona fide Ghanaian citizen and leader to promptly and boldly an courageously and authoritatively speak for himself and for what is right, Big Brother Musah, Brother Musah, Go to School, Go to School, All the Bells Are Ringing…. What is your damn frigging problem?!

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]