Trust Me, Brother Rashid Tanko, NPP Did Not Kill Omane-Boamah Et Al. - Part 1

The caption of the present article or column was not originally the thematically intended purpose of our present conversation. But since I have increasingly come to the ultimately singular and the unique conclusion that so incorrigibly wicked are the ways of the kleptocratic and the nation-wrecking leadership of the John “God In His Inscrutable Wisdom” Dramani Mahama-led Government of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), I just decided that the present headline might just purposively do for the subject-matter presently at hand. In one of my most recent columns, in the heat of rushing to meet the deadline for the publication of the same, I made the critical blunder of “Mis-Accolading” His Excellency Kwame Gonja with an off-key sobriquet; and for such an egregious error or miscalculation, I hereby profoundly apologize for the same.

I suppose what I really intended to say - and one which I have repeatedly said innumerable times - was “Divine Providence” or “God In His Inscrutable Wisdom. Unfortunately, Yours Truly ended up saying “God In His Inscrutable Power.” At any rate, I continue to marvel at the rate at which the Gonja-Mafia Posse has been literally getting away with capital crimes on a daily basis, including on the First-Anniversary Commemoration of the clearly strategically orchestrated Z-9 Helicopter Crash in the heavily forested thicket of Asante-Akrofuom, near the globally renowned deep-shaft mining town of Obuasi, near the Asante Regional Capital of Kumasi on August 6, 2025.

On this bizarrely commemorated First-Anniversary Roasting-Death of the Z-9-8 victims of the accident apparently according to plain, by the studious and the well-calibrated lights of scores of political pundits, what the Mahama regime ought to have been explaining to the Ghanaian people, ought to have been precisely how it came about that - per their own publicly recorded revelations - some four, or so, top government officials who were scheduled to board the ill-fated Chinese-made Z-9 Military Helicopter, including President John Dramani Mahama and Mr. Johnson Asiedu Nketia, National Chairman of the ruling National Democratic Congress, somehow, all got individually and separately called to attend totally different meetings and conferences, all at the same time, when they were, each and every one of them, supposed to have been on the same flight as the extant Defense Minister, namely, Dr. Edward Kofi Omane-Boamah, at least as publicly testified to the media by Alhaji Mohammed Mubarak Muntaka, Minister of The Interior and a self-proclaimed bosom friend of the late Defense Minister. Now, where were these Two-By-Four prophets when we need these clerical petty- trading fortunetellers?

Instead, we had a MacBeth look-alike President Mahama publicly retailing some propaganda poppycock about how the personal security of public and government officials was to be jealously guarded or “safeguarded” henceforth. And then, as has become characteristic with these congenital and rabidly mendacious political con-artists and common criminals, we had Kwame John disingeniously incantating about how the Okwawu-’Bomeng native - Did I hear someone say “Boomerang”? Dear Reader, do you recall how a then completely self-absorbed Communications Minister Kofi Omane-Boamah told the then Presidential Candidate Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo to literally get lost, on the critical question of what had become of the Mahama Government’s widely announced thorough investigations into the point-blank assassination of the then Nkwanta-South District Chief Executive Mr. Peter Kenyenso?

Anyway, in his rhetorical hogwash of an eulogy, the Bole-Bamboi petty chieftain would tell those among the commemorative attendees who did not appear to have something more meaningful with their time that Okwawu-’Bomeng’s own Dr. Edward Kofi Omane-Boamah was a rarefied and a nonesuch breed of a Ghanaian patriot because the partly Ghanaian and American-trained physician was blindly and almost quixotically loyal to the Bole-Bamboi native from the West-Gonja District of the former President Akufo-Addo-created Savannah Region. And just like the General MacDuff liquidating Junta-Monarch and Dunsinane resident, King MacBeth, President Mahama would megalomaniacally and narcissistically eulogize his conveniently and strategically slain lieutenant as follows: “Omane-Boamah’s [statuary] immortalizing is personal for me. Omane was a great human being. His kind is difficult to find in our world today. His love for me is[sic] undoubted; he was a friend, a loyalist and a close adviser. He stood by my side all through my political career. His service to the nation will never be forgotten” (See “Family, Friends Demand Omane Boamah Bust Replacement” Ghanaweb.com 8/12/26).

What is equally intriguing here, going by the public expression regarding Dr. Omane-Boamah’s acute discomfort prior to him going aboard the ill-fated Z-9 Helicopter flight on August 6, 2025, according to Alhaji Mohammed Mubarak Muntaka, is the weirdly and scandalously apparent fact that the Helicopter-Barbecued former Elections and Information Technology (IT) Director of the National Democratic Congress did not have his evidently “blind loyalty” to President Mahama decently repaid by this most important “advisee,” when such condign payback was most direly needed.

But for Yours Truly, though, what is most morally disturbing here is this figurative or metaphorical implication that, somehow, the name and the personality of Yagbonwura Kwame Gonja is inescapably and inextricably intertwined with the geographical and the geopolitical identity of Our Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana itself: “He stood by my side all through my political career. His service to the nation will never be forgotten.” And the next most logical query is as follows: “Never Be Forgotten By Whom?”

But, of course, that is not remotely what Yours Truly is thinking about at this material moment. Rather, it is about the fact that the Government of the National Democratic Congress would so strategically vacuously and fiscally wastefully fly out the mortal remains of the Z-9-8 victims to South Africa and then “Come Beck” telling us that the kind of DNA Technology that was required to forensically accurately identify the thoroughly charred remains of the victims, including the mortal remains of Dr. Omane-Boamah, was not available right here in Our Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana. Which, in effect, means that prior to the final funeral rites and the state-sponsored burial of the Z-9-8 victims, or rather sacrificial votives, as some ardent critics of President Mahama and his National Democratic Congress’ Government have even suggested, the mortal remains of the latter had already been forensically and positively identified by some of the best and the brightest and the most expert and competent forensic scientists and pathologists on the African Continent or anywhere in the world, using the latest state-of-the-art technology.

Well, if so, then why does the Mahama Posse have to erect a Cenotaph to honor the memory of the former Minister of Communications whose best service to the nation, in the strategically calculated words of The Most Powerful and Democratically Elected Yagbowura, appears to have been partly cavalierly supervised and stagemanaged by Mr. Stanislav Xoese Dogbe, the behind-the-scenes hatchet man whose near-fatal savaging of Yours Truly’s Beloved Nephew, Mr. Yahyah Kwamoa, of the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation (GBC), with the tacit and the collaborative complicity of the late Defense Minister, on the premises of the 37th Military Hospital, sometime during the first tenure of President Mahama in the late summer of 2015 or thereabouts. Trust me, Dear Reader, the jury is still out on this one, however long it takes!

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