Only Spio-Garbrah’s History Book Will Judge Mahama Favorably

He has held a remarkable number of portfolios under his belt, as it were. But that has not helped the main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) to acquit itself creditably vis-à-vis the latter’s contribution to the advancement of the country’s socioeconomic and cultural development. At least not in the books of the overwhelming majority of the Ghanaian electorate that gave the faux-revolutionary Rawlings-founded political machine the massive jack-booting that the NDC received in last December’s polls.

He was a very unpopular Ambassador in Washington during the Clinton Administration in the 1990s, when Mr. Ekwow Spio-Garbrah was recalled home, some say at the request of operatives of the Clinton White House, and named to the post of Communications Minister by the country’s most brutal and longest-reigning strongman. That was when, I suppose, the future President John Dramani Mahama served as Mr. Spio-Garbrah’s ministerial deputy. And then Mr. Spio-Garbrah was appointed Education and Trade minister.

None of his preceding cabinet capacities facilitated any remarkable success stories for the Rawlings-chaperoned two-term National Democratic Congress’ government. And so at best, the man presently spoiling for the presidential nomination ticket of the NDC, in order to lead his much-discredited party into the 2020 presidential election, could be described as a Titular Cabinet Operative (TCO) woefully bereft of any substantively functional traction or heft. It would take the John Agyekum-Kufuor-led government of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) to quadruple the size of Ghana’s economy.

By the time that Chairman Rawlings and his NDC Abongo Boys vacated the old European slave castle at Osu, Accra, the former seat of governance, the NDC and its junta antecedent, the so-called Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), had literally held us, Ghanaians, by the throttle for only a couple, or so, months shy of 20 years. The national economy had effectively ground to a halt. The seminal state-owned Ghana Industrial Holdings Corporation (GIHOC), composed of scores of factories scattered all across the country, had been quartered up and sold at giveaway prices to the cronies of Chairman Rawlings, some of his foreign friends and business associates, and his family members and relatives.

What makes this situation even more at once flabbergasting and horrifying, is that the key operatives of the National Democratic Congress claim to be socialists of the Beijing-Moscow variety of the pre-1990s era. And so I guess one could aptly label them as “Socialist Primitivists” or “Primitivistic Socialists.” Either way, one would not be wide of the mark. Mr. Spio-Garbrah would take the largely resumé-spicing post of Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Commonwealth Trade Organization, a cozy boondoggle whose appointees are selected more on the basis of nationality and regional provenance within the neocolonial geopolitical confines of the erstwhile global colonial possessions of the British Empire. He would be recommended and staunchly backed for the job by President John Agyekum-Kufuor, his ideological opponent, in the dubious name of national unity and conciliation.

As was to be expected, an ever-scheming and conniving Mr. Spio-Garbrah would use his vantage station abroad to systematically conspire and collude with the pathologically megalomaniacal Rawlingses to thoroughly and effectively undermine the government of his homeboy and clansman, to wit, then-President John Evans Atta-Mills, in a tactical bid to getting the now-late President Mills bumped off the party’s presidential-nomination ticket, should the visibly ailing former University of Ghana law professor decide to go for a second term at the Flagstaff House, which, by the way, the Rawlings marionette had paradoxically and contemptuously described as a “chicken coop.”

Indeed, as yours truly then predicted in these very pages, the former Ambassador to the United States would miserably fail. Now, Mr. Spio-Garbrah, flamboyantly and unabashedly sporting his honorary doctoral degree, is back again at state-side doing what he does best, disingenuously cajoling the man whose presidential ambitions he once suavely and obliquely attempted to circumvent, in the wake of the death of President Mills, by helicoptering into the center of Kumasi, where an emergency party congress was in session to decide on a replacement for the late president, and then parachuting down unto the pates of the crowd. Ok, maybe I am exaggerating a little bit. But only a little bit.

Recently, Mr. Spio-Garbrah has been doing the rounds of tens of media houses and radio stations in the nation’s capital, claiming, in a clearly and characteristically cavalier and condescending tone, that history will look upon the presidency of Mr. John Dramani Mahama “favorably.” But, of course, as it is all-to-be-expected, the man is not telling his audiences precisely whose version of Ghana’s political history we are talking about, or would look favorably at the Mahama presidency. Typical Spio-Garbrah, isn’t it?

*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
May 9, 2017
E-mail: [email protected]