Could President Mahama Really Be Truthful?

He is still in a state of shock and denial, vis-à-vis the veritable and incontrovertible fact that it was his abject administrative incompetence and the rank corruption and arrogance of his key operatives and cabinet appointees that got him back onto the gray margins of opposition political culture. It is not because the now-President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo promised Ghanaians some “Sugar-candy Heaven,” in Orwellian parlance, that auto-knee-jerkily induced Ghanaian voters to facilely offer their mandate to the former Attorney-General and Minister of Justice (See “NDC Defeat: I was Truthful; Akufo-Addo Promised Heaven – Mahama” Classfmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 5/4/17).

The preceding self-preening observation by former President John Dramani Mahama presupposes Ghanaian voters to be too cognitively addled or daft to hold their leaders accountable to their electioneering campaign promises. And the horror here is that Mr. Mahama said all this in front of a global audience in Durban, South Africa, at the World Economic Forum (WEF). Maybe he has so soon forgotten the streak of arrogance that got him jack-booted back into the reality that is the margins of opposition politics, so we need to remind him of the fact that in the lead-up to the 2016 general election, the presidential incumbent categorically told those who offered him his hotly disputed mandate that none of them had any constitutional right, whatsoever, to criticize his palpably poor job performance, because no other Ghanaian voters, other than former Presidents Jerry John Rawlings and John Agyekum-Kufuor, had ever sat on the most powerful seat of the land to cavalierly presume themselves to be either his classmate or coequal.

Even more scandalously, Mr. Mahama had used the occasion of his 2016 electioneering campaign to put his closest and most formidable political opponents, namely, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, and the latter’s three-time running-mate and former Deputy-Governor of the Bank of Ghana, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, in their place. Unfortunately for the blowhard and politically divisive Mr. Mahama, Ghanaian voters had seen Nana Akufo-Addo and Dr. Bawumia collaborate with former President Kufuor and the New Patriotic Party (NPP) to, literally, work wonders on the Ghanaian economy, by causing the latter to be expanded at least four-fold, in the wake of the extortionate and infamous Rawlings Revolution that left the economy practically on life-support.

If, indeed, as former President Mahama wants the rest of the world believe, Nana Akufo-Addo and Dr. Bawumia had promised eligible Ghanaian voters “Heaven,” then these voters were really the far more intelligent and self-loving to have flatly rejected the vacuous rhetoric of the man who was literally put into the patently oversized presidential seat by Justice William Atuguba, his fellow northerner and ideological “clansman.” There are, indeed, consequences for both political and judicial injustices, as both men are beginning to learn the hard way. You see, Ghanaians have not forgotten about the usage or, rather, the criminal abuse of their name and integrity in the Mahama-Kanazoe Ford Expedition Payola Scam. They have also not forgotten the SADA (Savannah Accelerated Development Authority) Scheme, in which the Bole-born Mr. Mahama used the historically and economically deprived status of Ghanaians of northern descent to outrageously defraud them even more.

The tribalistic nature of the selection of the SADA administrators also rudely informed Ghanaian voters that they egregiously erred when they were made to believe that in the election of “one of their own,” they had the panacea to all their problems vis-à-vis the grossly inequitable distribution of the country’s wealth. You see, Mr. Mahama thought that helping his younger brother, Ibrahim Mahama, scam the nation to the tune of billions of cedis was osmotically tantamount to making all northern-descended Ghanaians filthy rich. Now, Ghanaians ought to be proud of themselves that, finally, the man who had made no secret of desiring to ride them like donkeys has been resoundingly afforded the requisite heave-ho.

Yes, Messrs. Akufo-Addo and Bawumia promised the Ghanaian voter a “Heavenly” existence; and so far, the Chief Resident of the Flagstaff House and his Deputy appear to be well on their way to delivering what may very well be aptly termed as a “Seventh Heaven” to the people who so wisely and perspicuously offered them their mandate.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
May 13, 2017
E-mail: [email protected]