Generous Scholarship Opportunities for Talented African Students and Youths, in Lieu of Reparations - Part 5

Upon second, third and interminable poly-thoughts, it increasingly becomes unarguably obvious that the recently United Nations-tabled so-called Slavery Reparations Resolution could definitely not be seriously envisaged to be about the indefeasible affirmation of Justice, Dignity and Truth, as smugly, self-righteously and cavalierly claimed or supposed by the man who led this veritable charade, in retrospect, if also because Ghana’s President John “Ouagadougou Ford Expedition Payola” Dramani Mahama is the one most toxic and inexcusably carcinogenic, Fourth Republican Postcolonial Ghanaian leader who has done the most inscrutable and unconscionably worst to thoroughly dehumanize the existential integrity of Ghanaian Humanity and, in effect, Global African Humanity at large (See “Mahama Returns Home to Hero’s Welcome After UN Adopts Slavery Resolution” Modernghana.com 3/30/26).

The former lockstep - and some would even say lapdog - protégé and Communications Minister in the ragtag regime of the late President Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings could absolutely in no way be “truthfully” accused of studiously and/or religiously promoting the morally and the practically inalienable “dignity” of the Ghanaian citizenry, being wantonly, extortionately, immutably and inextricably stuck in the ungodly business of the unconscionable and the inexorable promotion of the statutorily proscribed genocidal and the environmentally destructive activity of Illegal Small-Scale Mining, infamously known all over the world as Galamsey, an environmentally predatory and heinous act of unpardonable criminality that has already resulted in the massive reproduction of deformed human and animal species of Nature, as well as the massive and the irreversible pollution of the country’s hitherto pristine waterbodies and forestry resources.

And throughout the perpetration of all these unspeakable acts of wanton criminality, President Mahama has relentlessly and blindly and deliberately promoted the hermetic prioritization of Electoral Victories, by hook and or crook, and the Indefinite and the Perpetual Entrenchment of the political party establishment that twice, nonconsecutively, rigged the ballot to foully and undeservingly put himself in the seat of power. His job-performance track record also eerily paints a picture of a latter-day rankly corrupt and grossly incompetent African leader who would have cut himself the ignoble and the decidedly unenviable picture of a Billionaire Continental African Merchant Slave Trader like Chief Tippu Tip or Tippu Tib, the Swahili and the Zanzibarian native, from the present-day Democratic Republic of Tanzania, specifically speaking, the Island of Zanzibar, who held a virtual monopoly over the crude and the primitive merchandising of Continental African Humanity and the ivory trade during the second-half of the 19th Century, in the eastern flank of the African Continent and the Indian Ocean Seaboard.

We, of course, predicate our submission on this aspect of our discourse on the readily accessible and forensically verifiable data on the massive and the genocidal botching of Ghana’s low-premium National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), established by one of his predecessors, namely, President John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor, from the country’s present main opposition political party, the Neo-Liberal so-called Center-Right New Patriotic Party (NPP). But, of course, the preceding observation is not the real story; rather, it is the impenitently dastardly attempt attempt by the then, even as now, President John “Ouagadougou-Nkonfem Flying” Dramani Mahama to criminally indemnify himself by deviously scapegoating his own handpicked extant Executive-Director of the National Health Insurance Authority (NHIA), Corporate Institutional Manager of the National Health Insurance Scheme, namely, Mr. Sylvester Mensah, for the Class-A Felony Fleecing of Funds Earmarked for the Administration of the Scheme.

The preceding racket, as it shortly came to light, had, indeed, been politically and ideologically conceived and rigged up in the criminally profligate guise of a “Scheme.” Mr. Mensah would have his bank accounts summarily frozen and his passports impounded and be officially notified of his imminent trial, conviction and his surefire imprisonment. As with all political affairs verging on official corruption, irrespective of one’s political party affiliation and/or ideological suasion, Mr. Mensah would never be brought to trial or justice. But here again, and once again, the foregoing narrative is neither the real and/or the true story. The real and the true story, as it were, was that like the globally infamous Alfred Agbesi Woyome Mega-Heist, the wanton and the existentially genocidal fleecing of the Agyekum-Kufuor-established low-premium National Health Insurance Scheme, was a collective, a consensual and a collaborative corporate act of capital or grand theft against Ghanaian taxpayers in which the proverbial lion’s share of the loot had actually been siphoned into the coffers and the electioneering-campaign warchest of the 2016 John Dramani Mahama ill-fated Presidential Election. At least that was the word making the rounds in Ghanaian media circles at the time.

But here, too, the definitive and the forensically unimpeachable answer lay smack in the near future. Which, ultimately, luridly and shamelessly came in January 2025, when the newly nonconsecutively reelected President Mahama named the supposedly thoroughgoing corrupt and inexcusably criminal Mr. Sylvester Mensah among the first batch of his non-cabinet executive appointees. This time, though, as expansively remarked upon by several major media outlets abroad, largely in Europe, having a criminally indicted Mr. Sylvester Mensah run an even more fiscally intricate and managerially gigantic and cranially taxing public enterprise as the Export and Import Bank of Ghana (EXIM Bank), tells the general Ghanaian and the Global Communities more about the identity of the real culprit of the $3 billion-plus mega-heist that was the thorough bankrupting of the John Agyekum-Kufuor-established National Health Insurance Scheme in the runup to the 2016 Presidential Election. Finally, the proverbial cat has been let out of the bag.

Now, what the foregoing details tell the global community about the caliber of leadership and the integrity of the Bole-Bamboi native, from the Akufo-Addo-created Savannah Region of Ghana, is that President Mahama’s decision to have Africa’s admittedly unfathomably massive and criminal exploitation by the West ceded legal recognition and compensation in the form of fiscal reparations from the key culprits is, at best, a slapstick comedy. At best, it painfully and embarrassingly exposes the inescapably cognitively clueless mindset of the average Continental African Leader, a shameless kleptocrat and a morally insensitive scoundrel and a rascal who fundamentally lacks scruples and merely pretends to be innately endowed with a decent modicum of morality.

Which, of course, is absolutely not in any way to observe or conclude that some form of reparative justice or monetary compensation of the kind awarded the victims of the Jewish Holocaust in the aftermath of World War II may not be perfectly in order for the descendants of the erstwhile perennially besieged and unspeakably chattel-enslaved and wantonly and genocidally exploited Continental Africans between the 1400s and the end of the 1800s. This brief discussion is only to necessarily highlight and/or underscore the morally and the logically unassailable fact that in Ghana’s President John Dramani Mahama, we have yet to put our proverbial best foot forward.

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