On the Run: Mahama Did Not Even Sit for the Corruption Test

I don’t know who the man desperately fighting for the nomination support of his party’s delegates for a highly unlikely second shot at the Presidency thinks he is fooling. Mr. John Dramani Mahama has been widely reported to have virulently accused Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, the man who resoundingly defeated the former in the 2016 Presidential Election, of woefully failing the critical litmus test of boldly refraining from shielding his appointees against whom charges of official corruption have been brought (See “Akufo-Addo Has Failed Corruption Test – Mahama” Modernghana.com 11/17/18).

The fallacy of such accusation inheres in the fact that the democratically ousted Mr. Mahama has personally and publicly admitted the fact of being fond of and prone to official theft and corruption. Not very long ago, for example, the former NDC-MP for Gonja-West, in the Northern Region, publicly told the nation that, indeed, he had taken the vehicular bribe of an American-made Ford Expedition SUV from a Burkinabe contractor called Mr. Djibril Kanazoe, in return for the offer of a Ghana government’s contractual award. He would later, rather foolishly, claim that the American-made Ford Expedition SUV was, after all, not his vehicle of choice. Would any levelheaded Ghanaian citizen say that a person with such a promiscuous payola soft spot ought to have ever been nominated Presidential Candidate by his party, let alone be declared substantive President of the Democratic Republic of Ghana by the highest court of the land?

We know exactly what happened on the Atuguba-presided panel of the Supreme Court that decided the 2012 Presidential Election in favor of then-Interim President John Dramani Mahama; and we have not hesitated to write and publish reams and volumes of media columns stating just that. By the way, has anybody forgotten what then-Interim President Mahama told the nation on the eve of the December 2012 Presidential Election, vis-à-vis the long overdue retrieval of the Woyome Mega-Theft? What this smug and shameless High Priest of Corruption ought to ask himself is why he, predictably and scandalously, failed to retrieve the hardworking Ghanaian taxpayer’s money from the key underwriter of his own political party, to wit, the National Democratic Congress, and not the patent non-issue of whether the Akufo-Addo Jubilee House has, in fact, assumed center-stage in corruption investigations involving members of the President’s cabinet and/or other executive appointees.

At least President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has laudably demonstrated that he is genuinely concerned about corruption allegations made against his appointees. In the $ 72 Million Heist involving Mahama operatives at the Social Security and National Insurance Trust (SSNIT), in which the lifesavings of hundreds of thousands of Ghanaian civil servants, most of them pensioners, was criminally squandered, the then-President John Dramani Mahama did not even put out a single sentence in the form of a Press Release indicating that he was serious about ensuring that the victims of such an unprecedented criminal racket would be jealously protected. You see, the former President is the quintessence of corruption, the veritable embodiment of all that is wrong with the corrupt banking system in the country, with the staunch and lock-step complicity and support of his Galamsey Specialist Brother, Ibrahim, of course.

And yet this pathologically unconscionable robber-baron would have Ghanaians believe that his party, the National Democratic Congress, the most thievish political machine in the country, has any comprehensive policy agenda for fighting official rot in the country. Is the criminal drawing of double salaries by his cabinet appointees the nonesuch hallmark of Mr. Mahama’s anti-corruption fight? Well, he may have heard the Finance Minister, Mr. Kenneth Ofori-Atta, let on to Parliament and the Ghanaian people at large that the Office of the Independent Special Public Prosecutor has been allocated a humongous GHȻ 180 Million to fight roguish and thievish politicians like the former Chief Resident of the Jubilee-Flagstaff House, with more money on the way to be supplied OSP as needed.

The Bole-Bamboi robber-baron had better watch out for the Galamsey Capital Denizens. There will definitely be hell to pay in short order, Dear Reader, were you to ask me.

*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York
November 17, 2018
E-mail: [email protected]