Did Sam George Fail His Varsity Entrance Math Exam?

The intention here is not to necessarily claim or insist that the National Democratic Congress-sponsored Member of Parliament for Ningo-Prampram Constituency, in the Greater-Accra Region, is a moron or arithmetically innumerate. On the latter count, the Nigerian-born Ghanaian legislator has said and done more than enough to rack up enough notoriety with a remarkable mass of Ghana’s electorate, including members of his own electoral district or constituency.

You see, his argument that a newly nonconsecutively reelected President John “I Have No Classmates in Ghana” Dramani Mahama has appointed all his 42 substantive ministers in just under four weeks, and that the Bole-Bamboi native from the Akufo-Addo-created Savannah Region had promised to appoint just 60 ministers, including deputies, in order to significantly cut costs, does not hold glue or muster scrutiny and actually unspeakably insults the intelligence of the average Ghanaian citizen. Unless, of course, the Communications Minister-Designate, at least as of the period in reference, also wants Ghanaians to believe that only a diddly 18 of these so-called substantive cabinet ministers have been provided with deputies.

You see, with Mr. Samuel “Sam” George Nartey - he seems to indescribably resent his “Afro-Ghanaian” name of “Nartey” with inscrutable vengeance. And yet, this young and petulant politician sports an accent that is inescapably, inextricably and incurably Ghanaian. Or rather, perhaps, inimitably Nigerian. He has also reportedly claimed that as a cadet and an undergraduate at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Kumasi, he had fathomed himself staging a military putsch so that he could violently remove an extant democratically elected President John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor and his New Patriotic Party (NPP) government, so that he could return the late former President Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings to the old Danish slave fort at Osu, Accra.

So, in short, we are all well aware of the exact location of his mindset and sympathies vis-a-vis the salient tenets of Ghana’s 1992 Republican Constitution. You see, according to the sometime ET Mensah wannabe and Judas-the-Traitor, so detestable did he find both the person and the presidency of Mr. Agyekum-Kufuor - my profound apologies to Kid Brother Samuel Koku Anyidoho - that he would rather have had the late former President Rawlings continue to rule the country in perpetuity or for life, whichever lasted longer. And as one acquaintance quipped to Yours Truly recently, a la a memorable reference to one of the classic plays of Nigerian dramatist Wole Soyinka, Sam George strikingly typifies the caliber of the “Madmen and Specialists” who have just been returned to Jubilee House and Parliament House to despicably lord it royally over wretched ones like us.

The truth of the matter is that even if each and every one of the 42 Mahama cabinet appointees is supplied with at least one deputy, and there could actually be two or three ministerial deputies down the pike, as it were, we would end up having 84-plus cabinet appointees and not the relatively 60 appointees that Sam George so smugly claims. Which, of course, is neither here nor there, since at the end of the day and the present discussion what matters most is the caliber of these ministerial appointees, and not the sheer strength of their number. By a rough estimate and at the last count, at least 40-percent of the Mahama cabinet appointees were forensically credibly indicted politicians who had to be literally and summarily cleared or pardoned by Pope “Clearing Agent” Dramani Mahama in order to qualify to be appointed to their present portfolios.

Now, couple the foregoing with the double-salary scam perpetrated on Ghanaian taxpayers by the previous Mahama government, and it immediately becomes clear and obvious that “cost-cutting” was the least among the worries of Mr. Mahama’s decision to significantly reduce the number of his cabinet appointees. After all, who has forgotten that old, popular maxim that says: “The fewer the merrier”? You see, literally throwing dust into the eyes of the Ghanaian people is what the key operatives of the witheringly vision-bereft National Democratic Congress does best. One had expected the Communications Minister-Designate to more seasonably discuss what gameplan the Mahama 2.0 government had up its sleeves that was any significantly or progressively different, this time around, from the last time around, when the former Rawlings-appointed “Shit-Bombing” Communications Minister was Chief Resident of Jubilee House, that is, assuming at least hypothetically that, indeed, the man who royally bungled the Agyekum-Kufuor-established National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), is the veritable man of vision that Sam George would have the rest of us that he is.

There is this African proverb whose cultural origin Yours Truly had been unable to locate as of this writing and media preparation, but which may very likely be of Ghanaian or at least West African origin, or even perhaps Chinese or Asiatic provenance. It runs rhythmically as follows: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” We are informed by our Google search engine that the preceding adage “highlights the balance between individual speed and collective strength and long-term success.”

From what Sam George is reported to be saying, it is limpidly clear that speed is more of the main governance objective of the Mahama 2.0 regime, and not the collective strength and the progress of the country at large, thus Kwame Gonja’s initial pooh-poohing of the landmark and the historically unprecedented Akufo-Addo-implemented Fee-Free Senior High, Technical, STEM and Vocational System of Education, which continues to constitute an epic bone of contention between the presently ruling National Democratic Congress and the country’s main opposition New patriotic Party.

The one maxim that I much more prefer over the preceding one, and which President Nkrumah was also globally known to like a lot, which also informs the overarching ideology of the erstwhile Organization of African Unity (OAU), presently renamed The African Union (AU), is the Bound-Broom Philosophy: The idea that it is easy for one to break up a single broomstick but absolutely impossible to break a tightly bound bunch of broomsticks.

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
March 24, 2025
E-mail: [email protected]