No Easy Walk In The Park

I have absolutely no doubt in my mind, whatsoever, that Nana Addo DankwaAkufo-Addo may very well be the most hardworking President of Ghana’s Fourth Republic (See “Sometimes I Worry for Akufo-Addo; He Works Too Much – Sam Okudzeto” MyJoyOnline.com / Ghanaweb.com 1/19/18). Relatively speaking, that is, taking his advanced age into consideration, one can perfectly agree with Mr. Sam Okudzeto, the well-respected and distinguished former President of the Ghana Bar Association (GBA) and presently Member of the Council-of-State, that Nana Akufo-Addo may be working too hard for the good of his own health. Which, ironically, recalls for me the saying of an old high school teacher of mine that: “There will be more time for sleeping and dreaming after death.”

You see, the Presidency, performed creditably, is the moment or season for etching one’s immortality into the proverbial national epic memory. And to be able to do just that, the lucky holder of the office will need to work indefatigably around the clock. More so, if one inherits the sort of gross administrative incompetence bequeathed both Nana Akufo-Addo and the nation at large by former President John Dramani Mahama. To hear Nana Akufo-Addo catalogue the instances, especially in the public procurement area, in which the former President took the Ghanaian taxpayer to the cleaners, as New Yorkers are wont to say, was simply heartbreaking. It also made one wonder how abjectly lowly Mr. Mahama thought of Ghanaians to want to be rehired as Chief Resident of the Flagstaff House.

I suppose that the man who once said that the Ghanaian voter had absolutely no right, whatsoever, to criticize his abysmally poor job performance, because the very citizen who voted the former Atta-Mills second-bananas into the seat of power and governance had never assumed the Presidency or occupied the Kofi Antubam-crafted State Chair and Mace, thinks that the average Ghanaian voter has the cranial capacity of a chicken. But what I actually want to highlight, and which I have been doing for quite sometime now, is the fact that President Addo DankwaAkufo-Addo comes to his job 8 long years late, having been prevented, twice, from doing so by the all-too-well-known narrative of the Monkey-Wrench which some key operatives of his own New Patriotic Party (NPP) put in his path.

And so in a fundamental sense, I guess one could aptly say that Nana Akufo-Addo did become President of Ghana because it was Divine Providence who so willed it. He traveled the hard way, and so he must have a profound understanding and appreciation for what it means to be President of Ghana at a time when a Neo-Nazi American President, of all global leaders, and a criminally willful tax-dodger, has had the temerity to describe Africans and Africa as the “dwellers of shithole countries.” Anybody who thinks critically and objectively can clearly see that in the one year that both Presidents Akufo-Addo and Donald John Trump have occupied their respective reins of governance, Nana Akufo-Addo has performed at least five times better than his “Big Nuclear-Buttoned” counterpart.

He is also hands down the intellectual superior of his second-generation American counterpart. What this means is that if, indeed, Mr. Trump is the sort of “genius” that he claims to be, no doubt, Nana Akufo-Addo is at a measurable minimum a “super-genius.” Can one imagine how even greater America could become, were we to exchange leaders, even for just a year, with Ghana? Then, of course, one could also really begin to see what a Stygian Shithole Ghana could become. One does not need to hold even a bachelor’s degree like Mr. Trump to fully appreciate the fact that with President Trump at the helm of affairs at the White House – absolutely no pun is intended here – America is eerily and dangerously headed down a Shithole.

And that Shithole, with a capital “S,” is, of course, euphemistically designated as “Alt-Right America.”

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