Mahama Would Have Butt-Kicked Amissah-Arthur

It ought not to have made headline news, but it did because in Ghana, our journalists and reporters are still desperately struggling to find their true calling. Which was why the most important aspect of the event which took place in the Presidential Suite of Jubilee House was so sheepishly, if also mischievously, buried deep down the brief news article that reported the event, making one wonder just what the lecturers and professors at the Ghana Institute of Journalism (GIJ) have been teaching their students these days. The real story was about some 1,350 budding Ghanaian entrepreneurs, from all 10 regions of the country, who “met up” – in mainstream American slang – at the Presidency for what appears to have been a brief preparatory workshop on how to more effectively and exponentially grow a well-thought-out business, after which the participants were awarded seed-moneys or startup capital ranging from GHȻ 10,000 to GHȻ 100,000 apiece.

This is what the real news story ought to have been about. But, unfortunately, it looks as if the pool reporter, or whoever's version of the story that got the widest publicity, or press play, had a totally different reportorial agenda. And so that poor excuse of a substantive media reporter or her/his editors came up with such “disgraceful” caption as the following: “Akufo-Addo 'Disgraces' Bawumia at Jubilee House Public Event” (MyNewsGh.com / Ghanaweb.com 8/17/18). That the Third-Person Verb of “disgraces,” that appears in the caption of the aforementioned news article, had been enclosed in quotation marks, ought to inform the critically thinking reader that even the editor(s) of the news article under discussion do(es) not believe that anything bizarre or untoward actually transpired between President Akufo-Addo and Vice-President Bawumia. Else, why would the latter have been called upon to present the monetary awards to the selected budding entrepreneurs who had attended this Business-Development Workshop?

It is also quite certain that the alleged encounter between the President and the Vice-President was not the very first of its kind on the morning of the event in question. (I have just viewed the video clip, and it simply does not appear to me that Nana Akufo-Addo, who had just entered what appeared to be an auditorium, followed and flanked on his left-hand side by his aides or guests, it is not clear to the viewer, was snubbing or even ignoring Dr. Bawumia. The President's focus was on the event and not on his arch-lieutenant, standing in the front line of the audience with many others. But I can readily guess the NPP faction to which the videographer who put this patent act of mischief on social media belongs. Let's just leave it at that). It is also quite obvious that whoever wrote and/or published this rather unflattering news story had an agenda beyond what actually transpired between both men.

And that agenda was clearly, of course, to prove that, somehow, Nana Akufo-Addo's personal and/or working relationship with Dr. Bawumia may strikingly mirror the widely reported short-shrift treatment that former President John Dramani Mahama and some of his most-trusted aides are known to have routinely meted late former Vice-President Kwesi Bekoe Amissah-Arthur. And before the latter, the late President John Evans Atta-Mills, and some of his aides, including then-Communications Director Mr. Koku Anyidoho, are widely alleged to have meted then-Vice-President John Dramani Mahama; and before the latter, Chairman Jerry John Rawlings to the late Vice-President Ekwow Nkensen Arkaah. I also don't know that this lurid and characteristically NDC attempt at political “equalization” works in this particular context, except for the fact that it clearly, if also pathetically, exposes the acute desperation of some National Democratic Congress' apparatchiks to bring the Akufo-Addo Administration culturally down to its own abjectly low and unsavory level.

Interestingly, but scarcely surprisingly, on the day that this sorry-assed news article was written and/or published, the biggest news in town, as it were, was the inescapably epic and progressive compromise agreement struck between FIFA – the Federation of International Football Associations – and the Akufo-Addo Administration, to have the Kwasi Nyantakyi-presided Executive Board of the Ghana Football Association (GFA) remain permanently liquidated, while the GFA itself, as a corporate entity or establishment, remained intact, even as FIFA collaboratively supervised the reconstitution of a new GFA Executive Board. Obviously, this was not the sort of forward-looking or progressive news story that the MyNewsGhana.com operatives wanted to report about the most dynamic, creative and visionary government of Fourth-Republican Ghana. Now, isn't this a crying shame?

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