Walk Like Atta-Woyome? Wallahi!

If all that he really wanted to tell Ghanaians on the 14th Commemorative Anniversary of the seismic, the epochal and the “mysterious” passing of a then-Incumbent President John Evans Atta-Mills, was that he had been studiously treading in the “footprints” - he was actually quoted to have said “The Footsteps” - of the man who brazenly looked Ghanaians smack in the eye and straight up and smugly lied to us about Mr. Alfred Agbesi Woyome’s having been literally gifted the ginormous liquid-cash sum of GHC 51.2 Million of Ghanaian Taxpayers’ Money, as a result of the latter’s being indebted to the infamous Chief Corporate Financier of the presently ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC), for supposedly constructing several FIFA-standard sports stadiums in the country, in order to smoothly facilitate Ghana’s hosting of the African Cup of Nations (CAF) Tournament in 2008, the Yagbonwura Kwame Gonja could very well have spared us the total waste of energy and time and the heinous criminality of thoroughly creaming our National Treasury and Coffers (See “'I shall continue to walk in late President Atta Mills' footsteps' — Mahama marks 14th Anniversary” Modernghana.com 7/24/26).

But, of course, as usual, the portion of his cant and morally bankrupt prolix that piqued the interest and amused Yours Truly the most was when, like the newly self-enthroned King MacBeth, the blood-splattered or spattered native of Bole-Bamboi, in the Akufo-Addo-created Savannah Region, told those captive attendees and the participants of the veritable commemorative travesty that was the most recent Atta-Mills Charade and Cantata that Kwame Gonja had been generously blessed with “the rare privilege of serving by the side” of My Dear Good, Old Uncle Tarkwa-Atta; and also that the leadership of the former University of Ghana Tax-Law Professor was firmly “anchored in conscience” and a “deep conviction” in the utmost welfare of the Ghanaian people.

Even so, it is ineffably ironic that the very first gut reaction that greeted the overwhelming majority of the Ghanaian people, in the wake of the still-unexplained set of circumstances that precipitated the passing of a Sitting-President Mills, was for the then-Vice-President John Dramani Mahama to weirdly and, in hindsight, not altogether surprisingly, let on to an already numb and traumatized nation that visibly appeared to have been completely caught offguard, or flatfooted, that, in fact, there was absolutely nothing out of the ordinary for his then immediate boss and prime benefactor have so abruptly and unceremoniously exited or been rudely shoved out of the giant wrought-iron portal of the 400-year-old former Danish Slave-Trading Fort at Osu, Accra, in exactly the manner in which My Dear Good, Old Uncle Tarkwa-Atta’s passing had been widely reported to have occurred, as it was all just an “Accident Systematically and Meticulously Rigged Up According to the Pre-Scheduled Agenda of Divine Providence” who had, believe it or not, Dear Reader, in his “Opportunely Inscrutable Wisdom,” had well beforehand concluded that it was well past time for the Almighty Gods of Damongo, Gonjaland, to get Kwame Gonja’s abjectly dysfunctional and clinically incapacitated boss promptly out of the way, so that the New Gold Coast could be historically blessed with the fortuitous accession of the very first Postindependence-Born Leader.

“This is a divinely unimpeachable moment of historical significance, which only Ghanaians who are irreparably and irredeemably afflicted with acute dementia or plain lunacy would dare to either question or impugn,” Kwame Gonja, as usual, flamboyantly decked in his Gonja tribal military gear, would pontifically declare in a five-point multicast news bulletin. “Henceforth, I am firmly in charge of Our Republic.”

As well, if any critically thinking Ghanaian Citizen had bothered to pay sedulous attention to the not-so-cryptic media-soundbite salvos of Mr. Samuel Koku Sitsofe Anyidoho, the Director of Communications of the Atta-Mills Presidency, one would have clearly and unmistakably heard the man who once claimed that the very visage or facial appearance of former President John “The Gentle Giant” (Kofi Diawuo) Agyekum-Kufuor made him want to throw up a puke greater than Lake Volta - My Dear Good, Old Uncle Tarkwa-Atta would promptly compel the Wheta, Volta Region, native to unreservedly and unqualifiedly apologize for such abject and civically objectionable display of insufferable disrespect and arrogance - tell the Ghanaian people that for most of the three-and-half years that Mr. Mahama played second-bananas to the so-called King-of-Peace, the then Sitting President of Our Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana, there absolutely little to a complete graveyard’s interactive warmth and verbal intercourse between the Ekumfi-Narkwa AWOL native, from the Central Region, and the man who has been widely alleged by the Ghanaian media to have been under close scrutiny and even a full-scale behind-the-scenes investigation of a criminal nature, for allegedly creaming Ghanaian taxpayers to the whopping and the scandalously heinous tune of approximately $200 Million (USD), in what would later become known as the “Brazil Embraer Aeroplane Purchase Affair.”

The fact of the matter is that in the temporally scattered and the not-so-cryptic words of Mr. Anyidoho, the now twice nonconsecutively elected President John “Ouagadougou Ford-Expedition Payola” Dramani Mahama was the last person that a visibly ailing and dying President Atta-Mills would have desired to be walking in his footsteps, quite contrary to what a politically insouciant Kwame Gonja would have the rest of us believe.

But then, who also said that the “Snake-in-the-Grass” former Rawlings-appointed Director of the Internal Revenue Services (IRS) was himself completely bereft of the self-same plumage of thoroughgoing corruption and graft. as the man who would immediately succeed him to the Presidency would have the rest of us believe? As Yours Truly exasperatingly pored over the news report that constitutes the basis of “write-up,” as most Ghanaians are wont to call it, he also wondered why Divine Providence, In His Inscrutable “Gonja-ian” Wisdom, had not deign it appropriate to promptly descend with lightening speed from higher up to deliver My Brother Kwame Gonja the same Atta-Mills-like kind of a terminal biff, in pretty much the same manner that he had dealt the Fante Ekumfi-Narkwa native.

The answer may likely lie somewhere between a palm-greasing payola largesse and a deft dodge daintily wrapped up in a tinfoil, trust me, My Dear Faithful Reader.

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
E-mail: okoampaahoofekwame@gmail.com

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