When Did the Professionally Nonchalant President Mahama Ever Follow Protocol, Koku Anyidoho?

It does not clearly appear to this writer that the question of precisely who has the legitimate authority to officially announce the widely reported airlifting of Vice-President Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang for medical treatment abroad, ought to be a major subject of discourse or national debate at a time when the very existence and the survival of the overwhelming majority of the Ghanaian people are direly threatened by the predatory and the unspeakably genocidal activities of state-sponsored environmental destruction by the Galamsey or the riotously rampant small-scale mining “industrialists” (See “Kwakye Ofosu the Right Person to Announce Vice President Prof Jane Naana’s Illness - Koku Anyidoho” Modernghana.com 3/31/25).

The bone of contention here is that since the Vice-President officially has a spokesperson - that is, a person who handles her day-to-day activities - it willy-nilly ought to go without saying that it was Nana Ama Pratt who ought to have officially announced the sudden illness and the flying abroad of Vice-President Opoku-Agyemang for medical treatment abroad. Now, let us not concern ourselves with the jaded and trite subject of “Friends and Family Government,” in spite of the fact that it obviously appears to Yours Truly that Nana Ama Pratt may very well be the daughter of Mr. Kwesi Pratt, Jr., the opportunistically freeloading self-proclaimed but roundly and publicly disowned and denounced stalwart of the rump-Convention People’s Party (r-CPP) and editor of the Insight newspaper.

In the characteristically buttinsky opinion of Mr. Samuel Koku Sitsofe Anyidoho, the former Deputy General-Secretary of the National Democratic Congress and the former Presidential Communications Director for the late President John Evans Atta-Mills, the onus of the duty of officially announcing the sudden illness and the redeye shipping out of the country of Vice-President Naana Opoku-Agyemang, for advanced medical treatment abroad, very likely to the United States of America or even, possibly, Canada fell squarely onto the laps of Mr. Felix Ofosu-Kwakye, the Minister of Government Communications and the Mahama Presidential Spokesperson, rather than Nana Ama Pratt, the officially designated spokesperson for the Vice-President.

Now, to the foregoing narrative ought to be promptly added that prior to her being flown abroad for medical treatment, Vice-President Opoku-Agyemang had been rushed to the University of Ghana’s Medical Center for treatment on March 29, that is, on the very same day that former President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo turned 81 years old. Now , what has kept quite a critical mass of Ghanaian citizens wondering regards the fact that it well appears that the Vice-President had almost immediately been flown out of the country, as soon as she arrived at the University of Ghana’s Medical Center and may not have even been officially admitted to any of the wards at arguably the country’s best-equipped civilian hospital.

On the latter count needs to also be equally highlighted the fact that even during what appeared to have been the terminal stages of his illness, the globally acclaimed Founding-Father of the National Democratic Congress, namely, former President Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings, never requested to be flown abroad for medical treatment (at least not to the knowledge of this author), when the country, in the morally sobering words of renowned pathologist and retired former Director-General of the Ghana National Medical Services, Prof. Agyeman-Badu Akosa, was replete with some of the best trained physicians and medical practitioners anywhere around the globe.

In the case of the late President Rawlings, postcolonial Ghana’s longest-ruling Head-of-State and two-term democratically elected President, the country’s oldest and largest civilian hospital or medical center, namely, the Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital (KBTH), was deemed to be perfectly suitable to take care of the health and the medical needs of Ghana’s most significant leader over the past half century. As well, the former twice consecutively elected Vice-President Aliu Mahama also spent the last days of his life receiving treatment for his illness at the Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital. Both cases of the foregoing leaders ought to have served as civically responsible and patriotic and emulative examples for the present coterie of the leaderships of both the ruling National Democratic Congress and the country’s main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) at large.

The unsavory and fiscally profligate habit of regularly flying our leaders out of the country for advanced medical treatment abroad has created a deleterious impact of the sort of leadership irresponsibility and the gross and the egregious dereliction of duty, which has unconscionably ensured that our healthcare system, services and institutional establishment would not be afforded the utmost level of fiscal investment and the requisite caliber of medical experts required to operate and manage world-class clinics, polyclinics and hospitals in the country. This unspeakably criminal state of affairs has also created a pretext for corrupt government officials under legal and judicial scrutiny and sanction to flee the all-encompassing tentacles of justice and accountability by stealthily shipping out of the country on the dubious grounds of strategically and mischievously timed medical treatment abroad.

Parliament needs to make laws that make it a felony criminal offense for any elected Ghanaian official, as well as “indirectly elected” executive operatives, to seek medical treatment abroad while actively engaged in the service of the Ghanaian people. The same self-destructive mode of conduct exists among members of the highest echelons of the country’s leadership, manifested in the form of socialism-talking and patriotism-speechifying Ghanaian leaders who routinely educate their children, grandchildren and relatives in some of the most expensive colleges and universities abroad, at the criminally abject expense and the detriment of Ghanaian citizens and taxpayers, and then these kleptocratic and state-capturing robber-barons end up shoving these foreign-manufactured children and grandchildren and relatives down the throats of wantonly exploited Ghanaian citizens and taxpayers as the next generation of Ghanaian leaders and the “natural dynastic replacements” of their crusading faux-revolutionary and morally self-righteous forebears.

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