Confessions of the Galamsey Promoters and the Ballot Snatchers - Part 6

I was not in the least bit amused by the official announcement by the Mahama Presidential or Government’s Communications Minister, Mr. Felix Ofosu-Kwakye - or Kwakye-Ofosu - the Dear Reader is respectfully invited to pick his/her choice - that the involuntarily live-cremated Z-9-2 cabinet appointees and the ruling National Democratic Congress’ Executive operatives who lost their lives in the afore-hinted Chinese-made Helicopter Crash of Wednesday, August 6, 2025, were to be afforded a “State Burial.”

Not the least bit because whether the late Defense Minister, Dr. Edward Kofi Omane-Boamah, and/or Dr. Ibrahim Murtala Mohammed, the late Minister for the Environment, Science, Technology and Innovation, and the six others who tragically perished alongside of the preceding two were afforded a “State Burial” or a “Regional Burial,” much less a “District Burial,” a “Township Burial” or even a “Village Burial” would not amount to the proverbial “Hill-of-Beans,” as many a New York City Resident is wont to say.

It would be utterly and absolutely beside the point because so trashily common have “State Burials” become in recent years that even not very long ago, My Own Well-Beloved KId Uncle, Mr. Samuel Atta-Akyea, who was traumatically disconsolate with the sudden death of one of his Chieftaincy Litigant” cousins, by the name of Mr. Kwame Boateng, if memory serves Yours Truly accurately, decided to organize a State Burial on the foregrounds of Ghana’s National Assembly Edifice or Parliament House. The late Mr. Boateng was at the time of his death, fiercely locked in a fiery battle with His Majesty, The Okyenhene, Osagyefo Amoatia Ofori-Panyin, II. The entire affair conveyed the patently pedestrian and sinister aura of “Black Magic” or foul play.

In the case of the August 6 “Helicrash” - or is it “Hellish-Crash”? - catastrophe, the most significant and the immediate questions that demanded prompt answering were not the fact of whether the apparently “Ritual Votives” or “Sacrificial Lambs,” would be afforded a joint State Burial or even several individual Regional Burials. Rather, what appeared to be most pressing by way of questions that required immediate and imperative addressing regarded the fact of why the pilot of the Z-9 China-made Helicopter had apparently been cleared to take off from the Kotoka International Airport (KIA), in Ghana’s capital of Accra, to the location of the country’s oldest deep-shaft mining town of Obuasi, in the central administrative province of the Asante Region, under a heavy blanket of fog and abjectly poor visibility, especially when the globally famous Municipality of Obuasi, in the Ancient Kingdom of Adansi, just outside of the Kumasi Metropolis, was only 140 miles away and could be easily and readily covered by road in barely two hours.

which obviously and immediately gets to the very heart of the sort of gross and the egregious leadership irresponsibility that has ensured that the overwhelming majority of Ghanaian leaders and government officials would routinely jet themselves out of the country on the flimsiest of health-related pretexts, such as the treatment of migraine and the common cold, often to such relatively far away places as South Africa, India, Britain and the United States of America, among a host of other technologically advanced countries, invariably at the expense of the poorly paid Ghanaian worker and civil and public servant.

The same much-maligned neocolonialist attitude of our leaders and politicians may very well be inescapably to blame for the sort of apparent recklessness that caused the deaths of the Z-9-8 passengers and crew on August 6. The questions reportedly raised by Mr. Bernard Mornah, no favorite politician of Yours Truly, did not half-deserve the sort of seismic groundswell of public backlash that allegedly met the same, especially if the former Presidential Candidate of the late former President Hilla “Babini” Limann-founded People’s National Convention (PNC), indeed, has any forensically credible evidence pointing to the fact of the pilot of the Z-9 Helicopter’s being woefully bereft of the level of professional experience necessary or required to be able to effectively handle the severe weather conditions under which the aforementioned Chinese-made Flying Machine took off from the Kotoka International Airport on that fateful day (See “From Mahama’s Bad Omen to God Punished NDC: Three Ghanaians Slammed Over Helicopter Crash Comments” Ghanaweb.com 8/12/25).

An equally significant question reportedly raised by the putative surrogate of President John “European Airbus SE Payola” Dramani Mahama, regards the frame-of-mind of Squadron Leader Peter Bafemi Anala, whom the notoriously stentorian critic claims to have recently lost his wife less than a month prior to commanding the Obuasi-bound flight, although Yours Truly could not readily locate any credible or reliable evidence backing up such claim.

Now, what is most significant to note here is the fact that at 35 or 36 years old and at the rank of a Squadron Leader, which is equivalent to a Major of the Infantry Division of the Ghana Armed Forces, Peter Bafemi Anala was absolutely no professional novice in the very matter that Mr. Bernard Mornah would have the rest of us, his countrymen and countrywomen believe, unless, of course, the critic could also forensically credibly prove that Squadron Leader Bafemi Anala woefully lacked the requisite flying experience, possibly, as a direct result of the Ghana Air Force’s lack of an adequate number of fighter jets or helicopters, to facilitate an adequate number of the minimum flight hours required by any pilot daring to so riskily and unwisely, to be certain, fly any aircraft in extremely poor visibility weather, the critic could very well end up putting his foot in his mouth, as it and were.

In short, Mr. Mornah would do himself and his audiences a lot of good by critically and adequately researching this aspect of the professional profile of his subject of impugnation and obloquy or aptly face being accused of an epistemically uninformed attempt to defame and discredit the late Squadron Leader Peter Bafemi Anala. As well, Flying Officer Manaen (or Manin) Twum Ampadu, at the professionally decent infantry rank of Captain, was absolutely no spring chicken, as it were, that is, absolutely no aviation “chicken feed,” as Bernard Mornah would have the rest of us believe.

It is, however, quite understandable - although absolutely inappropriate - in such emotionally fraught moments of acute and withering desperation and despondency for some officious media-hogging minor politicians to make such decidedly morally and epistemically and civically unwarranted remarks about victims of tragic events and catastrophes they know little to absolutely nothing about. The most righteous thing to do here is to wait patiently until one has acquired enough evidence to warrant such eyebrow-raising remarks.

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