Mahama Is Being Unwisely Too Sure of His Chances at Election 2012

There are several questions that ought to be answered by Transitional-President John Dramani Mahama, and his National Democratic Congress (NDC), before the Russian-trained former Minister of Communications can begin to rest assured of his chances of emerging triumphant from Election 2012. And more than anything else, the question that most levelheaded Ghanaians ought to be asking him is: Why was Mr. Mahama on a whirlwind book tour of the United States, largely traipsing New York City and Washington, DC, barely two weeks prior to the demise of an evidently deathly, and terminally, ill President John Evans Atta-Mills.

And since he claims to have maintained an essentially avuncular, filial and professionally cordial and affectionate relationship with the deceased president, the question that ought to be answered on this count is: Where was Mr. Mahama on the day of President Mills' death? And what does the now-President Mahama know about the circumstances surrounding the last several hours leading to the death of President Mills? And also when and how did Mr. Mahama come by such knowledge?

In essence, what I am trying to establish here is that President Mahama's likening of his naked political windfall – in his own words, a “Paradigm-Shift” – in the “auspicious demise” of his boss and immediate predecessor, to the Biblical story of Moses and his brother Joshua is, at best, a thinly-veiled insult to the intelligence of Ghanaian voters. For, clearly, unlike the legendary Joshua who was smack-dab and staunchly by the side of his elder brother on the long and arduous journey to the Promised Land, the now-President Mahama appears to have been Absent-Without-Leave (or AWOL) much of the time that President Mills was apparently in the throes of death.

This incontrovertibly appears to be the reason why relatively low-level cabinet appointees had to take seemingly interminable turns spooling yarns of comically transparent lies, in hindsight, on the question of the obvious ill-health of a president who either kept himself or was kept out of the public eye and clearly appears to have been holidaying for most of the three-and-half years that he supposedly sat at the helm of our proverbial ship-of-state.

We know, and believe, the preceding to be the unvarnished and forensically provable fact because in the wake of the passing of the man whose candidacy he adamantly championed through three elections, former President Jerry John Rawlings told the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and, in effect, the rest of the world, that his former protégé was only capable of sitting, straight-backed, at his office desk for three hours daily. Needless to say, we have asked this logical question before and hereby ask the same again. And that question, of course, is as follows: Who directly took over from the ailing President Mills, the remaining five hours, when the latter was supposed to be officially engaged and about the people's business, for which he was being fully paid, but was evidently incapacitated?

Let us also get one thing clear, before he begins to get foolhardily euphoric about the same. And it is the fact that his characteristically sly and devious attempt to playing the “Millsian” tribal trump-card of “Adzepa de owo ofie a oye” (to wit: a beneficial thing had better be kept among clansmen and women) will not work this time around. Needless to say, it is increasingly becoming apparent, and embarrassingly so (at least for those of us with a good conscience), that all his weepy craving for “Fante Sonship,” in the wake of President Mills' passing, was really about the Fante vote.

Now Ghanaians are, all of a sudden, being told about the intention of the Chinese government to building a sports stadium, free-of-charge, for the good people of Cape Coast, in honor of our deceased premier who hailed from the Central Region. We have yet to be, however, told exactly what President Mills did or gave to the Chinese government to deserve such a remarkable honor. And as Prime Minister Busia once poignantly observed, lavishly doting on Africans has never been known to be the strong suit of the Chinese, at least relatively compared to the erstwhile Soviet socialists.

Well, we hope the people of the Volta and Brong-Ahafo regions, whose NDC-promised universities, the same Chinese government was also supposed to have generously underwritten as part of a $3 billion soft-loan advance to the National Democratic Congress government, quite awhile back, are studiously paying attention.

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is Director of The Sintim-Aboagye Center for Politics and Culture and author of “Ghanaian Politics Today” (Lulu.com, 2008). E-mail: [email protected].