A Good One There, Mr. President!

It was all to be expected that President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo would use the more polite diplomatic word of “unfortunate” to describe the criminally unpatriotic attempt by the National Democratic Congress’ Parliamentary Minority to stall the citizenship registration process that is still ongoing in the country (See “Akufo-Addo Jabs Mahama, Minority on NIA De-Nationalization Claim” Classfmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 6/23/18). The President is reported to have made his “unfortunate” remark during the 2018 commencement, or graduation, anniversary ceremony at the Ashesi University. What Nana Akufo-Addo ought to have actually said in response to the criminally irresponsible likes of Messrs. John Dramani Mahama, Clement Apaak and Inusah Fusseini, among a platoon of other populist rabble-rousers, is that it is only the clinically insane who would voluntarily and unreservedly consent to the legitimate passage of a Citizenship Registration Act in our august House of Parliament, and then abruptly take to the media airwaves to vehemently debunk the legitimacy of the same.

Indeed, what is regrettable or “unfortunate” about the U-turn of these NDC Abongo Boys is the glaring fact that the overwhelming majority of these double-salary thieving political scam-artists are descended from the so-called Three Northern Regions, and the so-called World Bank of the National Democratic Congress, that is, the Volta Region, whose politicians are notorious for smuggling our National Health Insurance Cards into Togo and other neighboring countries, in order to have non-Ghanaian citizens register to vote in Ghana, thereby criminally disenfranchising the legitimate and bona fide heirs of Ghanaian democracy. It is also nothing short of criminally scandalous to reckon the fact that in the four-and-half years that he occupied the erstwhile Flagstaff House, recently renamed Jubilee House, former President Mahama did absolutely nothing to encourage his fellow Gonja tribesmen and women, as well as his fellow northerners to promptly register the births of their children. It also rather pathetic that crooked politicians like Messrs. Haruna Iddrisu, ABA Fuseini and Samuel Okudzeto-Ablakwa think and believe that they can cavalierly capitalize on their criminal negligence of the citizenship verification laws of our country to deliberately compromise the integrity of Ghanaian democracy.

It is as if these opposition politicians would rather have Ghanaians accept their gross civic irresponsibility as the Gold Standard Measure of Ghanaian citizenship than a simple compliance with the legitimately established requirements of proof of one’s Ghanaian citizenship, namely, the possession of a birth certificate or a passport. Then again, isn’t it inescapably idiotic and patently absurd for the likes of Messrs. Mahama and Iddrisu to presume to conjure up the scandalous figure of at least 20 million Ghanaians risking disenfranchisement for lack of the possession of birth certificates and passports, when these prominent opposition critics and patently reprobate politicians provide critically thinking and forward-looking Ghanaians with absolutely no scientific or objective proof of how they came by their criminally concocted figure of at least 20 million bona fide Ghanaian citizens risking disenfranchisement for non-possession of either a passport or a birth certificate?

In the case of former President Mahama, the figure given is 23 million. At the risk of sounding ethnically chauvinistic, it clearly appears that these northern-descended politicians and their Anlo-Ewe Trokosi Nationalist allies would rather have Ghanaian democracy literally thrown to the dogs than made even more wholesome and delectably functional for the necessary upgrade of the living standards of deliberately exploited and unspeakably impoverished overwhelming majority of Ghanaian citizens. You see, the paradoxical fact of the matter is that deviously packing our voters’ register with non-taxpaying citizens of our neighboring countries has done absolutely zilch to improve the quality of the general standard of living in the country, especially among people living in the Three Northern Regions, as well as the Volta Region, notwithstanding the fact that Ghanaian politics during the course of the last 40 years has been almost hermetically controlled by Volta- and Northern-descended politicians.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
June 24, 2018
E-mail: [email protected]