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Appiah-Kubi “Condescendingly” Means Well for Kwame Gonja

Feature Article Appiah-Kubi and President Mahama
MON, 13 JAN 2025
Appiah-Kubi and President Mahama

It is the sort of advice that no veteran or progressive-minded and experienced politician would want to take from a relatively far less experienced political opponent, no matter how professionally erudite, well-meaning or objective that political opponent may be deemed or envisaged to be. Which, of course, is not to necessarily imply that, somehow, the twice nonconsecutively elected President John “I Have No Classmates in Ghana” Dramani Mahama is a progressive-minded politician, much less a statesman with the collective good and the general well-being of the ordinary Ghanaian at heart.

We do know from such dozens of scandalous that the Bole-Bamboi native, from the Akufo-Addo-created Savannah Region, has been widely alleged to have been deeply involved in, such as the globally infamous European Airbus SE Payola Scandal, the Alfred Agbesi Woyome Mega-Heist and the Savannah Accelerated Development Authority (SADA) Boondoggle that Little Dramani is no above-the-pack or above-board Ghanaian leader.

There are, of course, a countless number of other scandals too numerous to enumerate here. The man was once described as a well-meaning leader who simply lacked the relevant level of fiscal and administrative discipline by one of his closest associates and party members, although I am inclined to believe that this rogue of a run-of-the-mill politician who once secretly negotiated for some Saudi-Yemeni unprosecuted terror suspects to be settled in Ghana from Cuba’s Guantanamo Bay, is not exactly one who prioritizes the utmost interest and security of the nation above all else.

Kwame Gonja is simply a very lucky self-serving and self-infatuated political opportunist. In this, though, he is absolutely no different from the rest of the hoodlum pack of front-row National Democratic Congress’ apparatchiks. On the matter of the unsolicited advice that was recently sent the former Rawlings-appointed Communications Minister nicknamed “The Shit-Bomber” by the electronic media, however, the allusion here, of course, is to the downright nuisance and patently unprincipled and officious and presumptuous recently defeated New Patriotic Party’s Member of Parliament for Asante-Akyem North Constituency by the name of Andrew “Andy” Appiah-Kubi.

And it is that the recently reelected President John “Ouagadougou-Nkonfem Flying” Dramani Mahama may have to promptly discard his electioneering-campaign promise to cap the magnitude of his cabinet at 60 ministerial appointees, if the former President feels that such a record-setting low number of cabinet appointees is highly unlikely to enable him to effectively and/or efficiently administer the affairs of the country (See “Appiah-Kubi Urges Mahama to Reconsider 60-Minister Pledge” Modernghana.com 1/13/25).

Now, while it unreservedly goes without saying that Little Dramani is not in the least bit the favorite Ghanaian politician of this author, not that this author really has any, nonetheless, such counsel is totally uncalled for and downright peevish and patronizing with a chauvinistic and ethnocentric twist and edge to it, if also because the unsolicited advisor rather condescendingly attempts to second-guess the far and away more experienced Mr. Mahama by stereotypically and mischievously urging the latter to humbly emulate former President John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor who, by the way, came to the presidency at a moment in his political career, when the now 86-year-old former New Patriotic Party’s Member of Parliament for Atwima-Nwabiagya Constituency, in the Asante Region, had absolutely no experience being at the helm of the country’s affairs and unlike President Mahama, could therefore not have clearly and fully appreciated the implications of his electioneering-campaign promise of keeping the size of his cabinet at a significantly smaller size or magnitude than that of his immediate predecessor, to wit, the late President Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings, the globally acclaimed Founding-Father of the National Democratic Congress and Ghana’s longest-reigning and most extortionate junta leader and bloody military dictator.

Andy Appiah Kubi’s pontifical public claim to principled statesmanship and all, we find his kind of advice to risibly and luridly constitute the sort of abject lack of principled leadership that has immensely contributed to the stygian depth and the unwholesome level of rank corruption that the country is currently facing, that has been widely faulted for the kind of fiscally wasteful “friends and family government” that all the previous Fourth-Republican Governments have been aptly, to varying degrees, of course, accused of being sorely guilty of, including the previous Mahama and the Amissah-Arthur-led ragtag regime of the National Democratic Congress.

It goes without saying that in terms of rising through the ranks, that is, the entire gamut of the political rungs, almost no currently living Ghanaian politician could be said to have acquired the stretch or extent of the experience notched by Yagbonwura Kwame Gonja, in much the same way that it used to be said of the late President George Herbert Walker Bush - or the Elder President Bush - here in the United States of America, beginning with District Assembly Representative, Parliamentarian, Minister-of-State, Vice-President and President, although as substantive President of the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana for some four-and-half years, the general performance of the Russian-trained communications propagandist left much to be desired. Yours Truly has also never forgiven Kwame Gonja for profusely and publicly thanking an “Inscrutable Divine Providence” for “opportunely” shoving my Dear Beloved Uncle Tarkwa-Atta permanently out of the way, in order to make way for the auspicious emergence of the first postcolonial-born Ghanaian leader, and is unlikely to forgive the Bole-Bamboi native from the Akufo-Addo-created Savannah Region, even if the former Ekwow Spio-Garbrah lieutenant at the Communications Ministry stays in power for the next twenty years!

What is more, it is also an open secret that the greatest bottleneck virulently militating against an efficient system of governance in Ghana’s Fourth Republic has far less to do with the sizes of the ministerial cabinets of all six governments of Fourth-Republican Ghana, than the sheer lack of the requisite combination of fiscal discipline, patriotism, talent and progressive and visionary leadership of the kind that look towards at least two to three generations into the future.

Add to the foregoing the seemingly pathological or clinically incurable penchant of the overwhelming majority of the Ghanaian citizenry for instant gratification and inordinate acquisitiveness, and the yeomanly task of moving the country upwards the Global Development Ladder (GDL) becomes even more daunting. What Ghana and Ghanaians need more than anything else presently are leaders who are personally invested in the destiny and the fortunes of the nation, and not “Afropean” or Ghanaian-Born Expatriates who occasionally barge into the country to use it as a mining quarry, only to amass and lift out their ill-acquired loots with them abroad, as soon as the tenure of the government from which they had made comfortable salaries and amassed other sources of questionable incomes, both fair and foul, is voted out of power or shunted into opposition.

Our presidents also travel outside the country much too often, mostly on relatively minor assignments that could be more fiscally gainfully be delegated to the dozens of Ambassadors and Representatives already handsomely salaried abroad. It makes one wonder whether flying wastefully around the world was the topmost priority on their national-development agenda, that is, if they have any at all. Which is precisely why it is imperative for all executive government appointees to be thoroughly vetted, including the use of such reputable foreign agencies as the FBI and its equivalents in such heavily Ghanaian-traveled or trafficked countries as Great Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and The Netherlands to name only a few,, to ensure that these “Summertime Politicians” and fair-weather patriots have not been selling up short their countrymen and women abroad.

Yours Truly has always maintained that even if a third of the wealth thievishly or even genuinely acquired wealth and shipped abroad by a remarkable mass of these Ghanaian politicians was gainfully invested in the country, there would be little need for our leaders to be constantly traveling abroad to shamelessly solicit pothole patches of “Band-Aid” kind of loans from the Bretton-Woods Establishments of the International Monetary Bank (IMF) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), better known globally as The World Bank.

As a people, it goes absolutely without saying that we are our own worst enemy. And it is a damn pity and a crying shame that some of us prefer to viciously scapegoat the Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia-afflicted elderly members of our families and clans for our own gross and morally flagitious misdeeds. God save us from our own evil and wayward ways.

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
January 13, 2025
E-mail: [email protected]

Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD, © 2025

Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD, taught Print Journalism at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City, for more than 20 years. He is also a former Book Review Editor of The New York Amsterdam News.. More He holds Bachelor of Arts (Summa Cum Laude) in English, Communications and Africana Studies from The City College of New York of The City University of New York, where he was named a Ford Foundation Undergraduate Fellow and the first recipient of the John J. Reyne Artistic Achievement Award in English Poetry (Creative Writing) in 1988.

The author was part of the "socially revolutionary" team of undergraduate journalists at City College of New York (CCNY) of the City University of New York (CUNY), who won First-Prize certificates for Best Community Reporting from the Columbia University School of Journalism, for three consecutive years, from 1988 to 1990.

Born April 8, 1963, in Ghana; naturalized U.S. citizen; son of Kwame (an educator) and Dorothy (maiden name, Sintim) Okoampa-Ahoofe; children: Abena Aninwaa, Kwame III. Ethnicity: "African." Education: City College of the City University of New York, B.A. (summa cum laude), 1990; Temple University, M.A., 1993, Ph.D., 1998. Politics: Independent. Religion: "Christian—Ecumenist." Hobbies and other interests: Political philosophy.

CAREER: Ghana National Cultural Center, Kumasi, poet, 1979–84; Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, worked as instructor in English; Technical Career Institutes, New York, NY, instructor in English, 1991–94; Indiana State University, Terre Haute, instructor in history, 1994–95; Nassau Community College, Garden City, NY, member of English faculty. Participant in World Bank African "Brain-Gain" pilot project.

MEMBER: Modern Language Association of America, National Council of Teachers of English, African Studies Association, Community College Humanities Association.

AWARDS, HONORS: Essay award, Nassau Review, 1999.
Column: Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

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