Trust Me, Mr. Krow, Ghanaians Are Not This Stupid!

Anybody who does not see the bloody and chilly fingerprints of former President John Dramani Mahama on the badly battered body of the slain Capt. Maxwell Adam Mahama, posthumously elevated to the senior military rank of a Major, must promptly see a psychiatrist. That godforsaken buster must definitely be living in a fool’s paradise. Needless to say, Capt. Mahama, who was tragically lynched in the Upper-West Denkyira township of Obuasi (or Boase), in the Central Region, on May 29, was the veritable victim of President Mahama’s happy-go-lucky attitude towards the wantonly predatory and life-threatening activities of Galamsey or illegal mining operatives.

It was, therefore, all to be expected that the cynical operatives of the main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) would attempt to capitalize on the tragic death of Capt. Mahama to score cheap political points. And this is precisely what an article captioned “Ghanaians Demand John Mahama’s Return” Ghanaweb.com 6/10/17), which appeared on several Ghanaian-oriented media websites, sought to achieve in the wake of the funeral and burial rites for the nephew who unsuspectingly was forced to taste some of the poisonous political brew of his own uncle and former president, Mr. John Dramani Mahama. It may be recalled herein that these same National Democratic Congress’ operatives staged a similar political gimmickry following the clearly bizarre and suspicious death of then-President John Evans Atta-Mills; the latter’s then-arch-lieutenant and substantive Vice-President, Mr. John Mahama, would celebrate this eerie event as a timely act of Divine Providence “in his inscrutable wisdom.” He would also use this most traumatic event to hoodwink the Fante electorate into massively casting their ballot for him. “Make me one of your own sons of the soil,” a disingenuously theatrical Interim-President Mahama would crocodile-weep like a baby, before a teeming gathering of the chiefs and people of Cape Coast.

The author of the afore-referenced article, Mr. Andrews Krow, claims that when former President Mahama entered the funeral grounds, held on the forecourt of the State House, some disconsolate mourners approached him and expressed remorse for not having unreservedly and massively voted to return the man who denied our teachers and nurses their long-established trainee allowances to the Flagstaff House for the second time. I have absolutely no doubt that some cognitively addled and grossly misguided and melancholy-wracked mourners had, indeed, sheepishly approached Mr. Mahama and made some of the excusably irrational remarks attributed to them. But it is far more significant to recognize the context in which such “sweet-nothing” remarks were, that is, the unbalanced and unhinged emotional state of these mourners, than the real contents of the aforesaid remarks themselves.

Maybe the author of the article in question thinks that the overwhelming majority of the Ghanaian electorate is composed of clinical masochists, to actually think of returning to power the first postcolonial Ghanaian leader to tell his own electors that these mandate holders had absolutely no right, whatsoever, to criticize his administrative performance because they had, themselves, never been elected to occupy the highest office of the land.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
June 10, 2017
E-mail: [email protected]