Mahama Is Fast on His Way to Royally Failing His First Test on Dumsor

His desperate assurances on the 2024 electioneering-campaign trail and all, it is increasingly becoming eerily clear that the man who gained global infamy for Ghana by having the word “Dumsor” entered into the global political lexicon and becoming a household word for gross administrative incompetence, learned absolutely nothing during the eight years that he claimed to have been studiously immersed in the intricate techniques of making himself a much better and a more intellectually and psychologically mature leader. Of course, there is something unpardonably weird about such a vaunt when a newly elected Ghanaian President introduces himself to a packed inaugural convocation of the nation and the proverbial International Community as “President Ahmed Bola Tinubu of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ghana.”

Indeed, as Yours Truly has already observed in more than a dozen mini-essays and articles, the Bole-Bamboi native from the Akufo-Addo-created Savannah Region is poised to make even more egregious mistakes and nationally embarrassing blunders than ever before. For instance, among the very first batch of his cabinet appointees is Mr. Mahama’s fellow Gonja clansman and widely alleged moneybag, namely, Mr. John Abu Jinapor who, as Deputy to former Petroleum Minister Mr. Emmanuel Armah Kofi Buah, was strategically and almost stealthily transferred over to the short-lived custom-tailored Power Ministry to both look over the shoulders of the disgraced, royally failed and promptly fired Dr. Kwabena Donkor as the latter’s understudy and by the very nature of his very bizarre and suspicious appointment, bring home as humongous a chunk of the proverbial bacon as Mr. Mahama’s homeboy could thievishly make possible. But, wait, that is not the real story here.

Rather, the Shakespearean rub here is that having willfully and eagerly colluded and collaborated with Dr. Kwabena Donkor, himself, a conjugal relative of First Lady Lordina Mahama, to serve Ghanaian taxpayers some of the most hairbrained contractual energy compacts, by several media reports at the time, Mr. Jinapor would vehemently deny having had any hand in the very purpose, at least ostensibly, for which he had been transferred from the Petroleum Ministry to the Mahama-created ad-hoc Power Ministry. In short, like his boss and fellow Gonja clansman, John Jinapor is an inveterate enemy of truth and leadership accountability and a man who cannot be trusted to even remember the name of the last woman that he dated or coitally or romantically dallied with just before getting married, that is, hypothetically assuming that, indeed, Mr. John Abu Jinapor is a responsibly married man.

He also appears to be shamelessly and scandalously cursed with a forked tongue which makes him vehemently and publicly claim that, somehow, his boss, Little Dramani, had effectively and definitively resolved the Mahama-Dodged or Evaded canker of Dumsor prior to him being democratically ousted by Ghana’s electorate in December 2016, while exactly a whole year later, Mr. Jinapor would stridently take to the electronic media airwaves to vehemently castigate and accuse the then President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo of suavely, subtly and dishonestly hiding the fact that, in reality, the malaise of Dumsor had, after all, not been solved by the previous Mahama regime, as smugly and cavalierly claimed by the former Arch-Lieutenant of the mysteriously “vanished” President John Evans Atta-Mills, the man whose proverbial living daylights had been literally opportunely and auspiciously snuffed out by an “Inscrutable Divine Providence,” so as to make way and, presumably, hay as well, for the glorious and the serendipitous accession of the first postcolonial-born Ghanaian leader.

Anyway, for those of our readers who may have so soon forgotten the same, Mr. Jinapor made the remarks about Nana Akufo-Addo having suavely and strategically and deliberately refused to acknowledge the fact that as late into the first year of the first term of his two consecutive tenures, that is, either late 2017 or early 2018, that the Mahama-bequeathed blight and canker of Dumsor was still very much alive and well, just about the same time that the Ghana Electricity Company (GEC) had scheduled some necessary alternating power outages in the Pokuase Area of Northeastern Accra, while some outdated and malfunctioning power-supply transformers and cables, which had been installed nearly a half-century earlier, were being responsibly replaced by the Akufo-Addo-led government of the New Patriotic Party.

In short, in Mr. John Jinapor, Ghanaians have a veritable political chameleon who cannot be the least bit trusted with the highly sensitive portfolio of Energy Minister. He has absolutely no enviable governance track record as a ministerial understudy, such as could be unarguably said of Dr. Yaw Osei-Adutwum, the Akufo-Addo-appointed former Deputy Education Minister and, subsequently, promoted to the portfolio of substantive Education based on his sterling professional and administrative performance. For those of our readers who may not already know, it was the Bosomtwe Constituency native, from the Asante Region, who took a totally collapsed Ghanaian public education system and almost overnight made it the second best on the African Continent, within the relatively short span of some five or six years.

As of this writing, I had sighted the headline of a news story in which the newly Mahama-appointed Energy Minister was reported to have already begun flexing his muscles by imperiously demanding the stoppage of some payments due to some power-supply agents or agencies that had already fulfilled the terms of their contracts. I was in a rush to complete the preparation of this column so did not have the time to read the full details of the aforesaid article to ascertain precisely why Mr. Jinapor appeared to have already begun mischievously creating an avenue for the possibility of a Judgment-Debt Suit against the newly installed Mahama regime, so that the globally infamous National Democratic Congress’ Looting Brigadiers would, a la Woyome-Style, begin creaming Ghanaian taxpayers without any qualms about the wobbly state of our beloved nation’s economy, the very electioneering-campaign pretext that shot the Mahama and the Johnson “The Mosquito” Asiedu-Nketia Posse into Jubilee House.

As for those of our readers who did not read what Mr. Alexander Kofi Mensah Mould recently had to say in a screed to his just-defeated main political opponents of the New Patriotic Party, having been sidelined over the course of the past 8 years, the State-Capturing Brigadiers of the National Democratic Congress are hellbent on turning the heat of economic dire straits against their inveterate political opponents and mortal enemies of the Elephant Party. We also intend to revisit the Jinapor story shortly down the line. Once again, it characteristically well appears that the Gonja Mafiosi are up to their well-known dirty tricks once again, of the sort which prompted Associate Supreme Court Justice Emeritus Jones M. Dotse to characterize the wanton and ungodly shenanigans of the Bole-Bamboi and the Damongo and Yapei Boys as firmly and incorrigibly grounded in the mantra of “Creating, Looting and Sharing” the collective wealth of the country among themselves.

Which is also why at best he could only be taken half seriously, when President Mahama told attendees at the recent National Convention of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Mission of Ghana that his newly installed administration had been tirelessly working around the clock to maintain the Akufo-Addo-bequeathed stability of energy supply in the country (See “Don’t Despair, Your Lights Will Stay On - Mahama Assured Ghanaians Amid Looming Power Crisis” Modernghana.com 1/9/25). Implicit in the latter promise, of course, was the thinly veiled admission by this pathological liar that, contrary to his vehement denials and protestations in the recent past, Yagbonwura Kwame Gonja had not been able to solve the canker of Dumsor under his previous watch and tenure. Once again, the real problem here has little to absolutely nothing to do with the fact of whether Mr. Mahama can be taken at his word.

Rather, it all has to do with the unarguable and the incontrovertible fact that the infamous “Shit-Bomber” is a has-been run-of-the-mill accidental Ghanaian President - he still thinks and believes Nigeria’s President Ahamed Bola Tinubu is the President of Ghana - who has no worthwhile governance performance track record to credibly shore up his promise, however solemn or serious the promise-maker may seem and/or sound.

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
January 9, 2025
E-mail: [email protected]