Amissah-Arthur Must Take Responsibility for His Own Mistreatment, Dead or Alive

The man is dead, buried and gone to wherever humans go when we die, so other than the celebration of his worthwhile achievements, real or imagined, while here on Earth with us, I see absolutely no reason why some Ghanaians feel they, somehow, have the right to disturb our peace and quiet. I see absolutely no reason why we should be bombarded with pointless and oblique stories of how the former Vice-President and former Governor of the Bank of Ghana was maltreated and disrespected by aides close to his former boss, then-President John Dramani Mahama (See “Mahama Boys Frustrated Amissah-Arthur – NDC Envoy” Classfmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 8/2/18). The fact of the matter is that the late Mr. Kwesi Bekoe Amissah-Arthur was not forced at gunpoint to assume the handsomely paid mantle of the Vice-Presidency, in the wake of the passing of then-President John Evans Atta-Mills, whose close aides and associates, including then Communications Director at the Presidency, Mr. Koku Anyidoho, were also widely alleged and rumored to have abjectly disrespected then-Vice-President Mahama.

So what we have here may be aptly envisaged as a warped form of karma, in which the infamous “shit-bombing” Gonja native and former Rawlings’ Communications Minister decided to pay back the snooty Fante cabal among the vanguard ranks of the leadership of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) with a vengeance. Indeed, contrary to what his passionate and fanatical partisans would have the rest of us believe, had he been the kind of principled gold-caparisoned personality that his legion homage payers claim him to have been, Mr. Amissah-Arthur would have promptly resigned his post, once it became crystal clear to him that he was not being accorded the kind and level of respect that he thought he or his seat and position of the Vice-Presidency deserved, after being cheaply used by the Gonja Mafia to curry the Fante sympathy and massive vote in the leadup to the 2016 general election. In plain “spoken” language, the man was simply and inextricably one of the NDC’s pack of hoodlums who had mischievously colluded and collaborated with Chairman Jerry John Rawlings and his Trokosi Nationalist Goon Squad to hijack Ghanaian democracy and cause the total ruin of our nation’s economy for some 20-plus years.

Still, I perfectly understood and even fully appreciated and, in fact, welcomed the well-measured and rhythmic screed mercilessly unleashed by the widow of the dead man on some of the key operatives of the National Democratic Congress whom Mrs. Matilda Amissah-Arthur painfully felt were hypocritically attempting to paper over their backhanded treatment of her late husband. We are even told in one news story that I chanced across recently, that the then President Mahama had made a routine protocol of having the brash and brawling Mr. Stanislav Xoese Dogbe give marching orders to the late Vice-President; and that even in one instance, Mr. Amissah-Arthur was ordered to turn around and immediately return the Presidential Jet on which he had embarked on an official duty to Abuja, the Nigerian capital, while he was smack in the middle or halfway into the flight. Now, what sort of self-respecting Ghanaian citizen and leader would accept such form of abuse other than a clinical idiot?!

At any rate, don’t let us, the living, equally fool ourselves by pretending that the late former Vice-President was without his own generous share of serious flaws or foibles. I mean, we are talking about a political campaign operative who salaciously made a major policy issue out of the height of then-Candidate Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, his immediate boss’ most formidable political opponent. Interestingly, when then-Vice-Presidential Candidate Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia dared Mr. Amissah-Arthur to an epic contest of the minds, the longtime Deputy Finance Secretary and arch-lieutenant to Prof. Kwesi Botchwey, under the erstwhile Rawlings-led junta of the so-called Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), took to his heels. Quite amusingly, at his memorial service at the Accra International Conference Center (AICC), a visibly agitated and shamefaced former President Mahama was flippantly and unconscionably pretending as if the man that he had been widely alleged to have ineffably and inexcusably disrespected and even been in the process of replacing with another seasoned half-Fante toady, to wit, Ms. Hanna Tetteh, was the best and most genius economist to have been counted among the rag-tag front-row of ravenous public-dole scavengers of the National Democratic Congress.

How else any of his staunch supporters would have had Mr. Mahama put his own vaulting political ambitions on hold while zestfully promoting those of the accidental Vice-President who had been “tribalistically” brought in to complete the six months left on the uncompleted tenure of the late President Mills, simply staggers my sense of decency and imagination. But, of course, we are talking about the narcissistic Rawlings Posse who are globally infamous for reading virtually everything moral and political backwards. And by the way, was it totally accidental that Ms. Tetteh, the half-Hungarian Mahama Foreign Minister, who was widely rumored to be engaged in a torrid romantic affair with her boss, and the very woman who had been given a presidential speech that Mr. Mahama had been scheduled to read before a plenary conference of big-city African mayors, but was unable to do so due to a schedule conflict, in the clear and conspicuous presence of his arch-lieutenant, the substantive Vice-President of the Democratic Republic of Ghana?

And you wonder why Mrs. Matilda Amissah-Arthur had boldly chucked glad-handed diplomacy to the Jospong trashcan and decided to aim in-between the bloodshot eyeballs of the Bole-Bamboi petty chieftain? Come on, somebody needs a reality check here!

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
August 2, 2018
E-mail: [email protected]