The Road To Kigali – Part 33

I just finished reading a copy of President Mahama's State-of-the-Nation Address (See “State of the Nation Address by H. E. John DramaniMahama, President of the Republic of Ghana and Commander-in-Chief of the Ghana Armed Forces”) and find it to be surprisingly better written than almost every one of the State-of-the-Nation addresses presented to Ghana's Parliament by the late President John Evans Atta-Mills.

Somebody has even suggested that the ink-marks of that relative of mine who edited and promoted Mr. Mahama's maiden memoir are splashed all over the damn document.

I don't know whether the slight grammatical and editorial improvements in the speech call for any celebration as such – for one still comes across such verbal howlers as “begun” instead of “began,” and “run” instead of “ran.” But these are unavoidable authorial devils, as it were.

That I was none the least bit impressed cannot be gainsaid; Mr. Mahama has yet to convince me that he is capable of giving a full-throated and full-length national address without the unnecessarily convulsive need to lying about the way things were, in the healthcare sector, when the Mills-led National Democratic Congress (NDC) took over from the Kufuor-led New Patriotic Party (NPP) administration.

Thus, we “hear” President Mahama back-patting the NDC and himself in the following vein: “In the area of healthcare, the national health insurance scheme [sic] whose implementation we inherited after we have [sic] piloted it in the first NDC administration has been strengthened. Active membership of the scheme, utilization, claims payments and other important indicators of public confidence have risen sharply over the last four years.”

Wow! In other words, the NHIS is the veritable brainchild of the Rawlings-led National Democratic Congress that was fully developed and even “piloted” before the NDC handed over the fully conceived and mapped-out blueprint generously to the Kufuor government for the rather facile phase of mere implementation. You see, this is the kind of verbal and moral abuse – presidential and/or executive – that I cannot abide. And if Mr. Mahama wants to be respected and taken seriously, he had better start telling the truth.

Maybe, for starters, the Bole-Bamboi chieftain ought to be resonantly reminded that the “Cash-and-Carry” healthcare policy that uniquely defined the Rawlings administration had absolutely nothing to do with National Health Insurance Scheme piloting. On this count, I am very elated that my good, old Uncle Diawuo could not make it to Parliament House to hear such “Baloney!” Of course, I fully understand the latter to be one of the favorite curse words of the Bamboi history scholar.

I also find it quite fascinating that the National Health Insurance Scheme appears in the president's speech lowercased. And this ought to be a clear signal to the critical thinker that the man simply did not feel adequately comfortable in pulling this woolen one over the eyes of his living witnesses, his teeming Ghanaian audience of listeners and spectators. Equally fascinating, of course, is the fact that within the same sentences in which his NHIS false testimony appears, the name of the National Democratic Congress appears initialed in block capitals.

The man also mischievously grinned, feline fashion, as he dreamily let drool out of his gaping jowls the following three sentences: “The NDC administration, as Honorable members will recall, came into office at a time when the economy of this nation was in significant distress. Through hard work and [the] implementation of prudent fiscal and monetary policies, we were able over the last four years, to stabilize the macroeconomic environment. This resulted in [the] remarkable acceleration of our growth.”

Indeed, those “Honorable Members” of the House who actually deserve such queasily inflated accolade are apt to strikingly recall something far, far different from what appears in the preceding quote. And it is the inescapable fact that shortly after taking over from the Kufuor administration, the first official letter that the NDC's own Finance Minister, Dr. KwabenaDufuor, wrote to the IMF/World Bank group seeking more development loans, highlighted the fact that the outgoing New Patriotic Party government had, within the piddling span of eight years, remarkably and successfully managed to lift Ghana out of the unfathomable economic distress bequeathed Mr. Kufuor by the free-spending and incurably corrupt Rawlings government.

And so, yes, the “Honorable Members” of our august House of Parliament do recall something, but that something is totally different from what President Mahama would have his fellow citizens and the rest of the world believe. And this is also part of the reason why he does not deserve to rule our roost.

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
Jan. 7, 2013
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