Kofi Buah, It Is a “Barge,” Not “Badge”

Emmanuel Armah Kofi Buah

Once again, the article captioned “NPP’s Incompetence on Display Again – in the Handling of ENI’s OCTP Project,” written by Mr. Kofi Buah, the Mahama-appointed former Energy Minister, reminded me of that jaded story in which the soot-kilned earthen pot is reported to have raucously sneered at the kettle and asserted that the latter was too black/dark for comfort. Of course, no pun is intended here, being reasonably black and a proud Ghanaian-born African myself, although a similarly facetious case could also, of course, be made of the immutably genetical fact of Mr. Buah’s being midnight-Nzema black. At any rate, I found the former Petroleum Minister’s blistering inability to spell and/or differentiate between the words “barge,” which is a medium-sized or a small ship, from “badge” to be nothing short of downright scandalous.

The man kept calling the infamous Karpowership a “badge,” which immediately reminded me of those poppy badges we used to seasonally pin onto the lapels of our school uniforms when we were in primary and middle schools. However, the man ought to be commended for being able to write quite passably well, although his writing is generally full of so many run-on sentences that the critical reader begins to wonder whether the writer took any advanced or even introductory college composition courses. It also began to puzzle me a little bit as to why the likes of Mr. Buah, along with his former boss, former President John Dramani Mahama, and the politically jaded likes of Mr. Alban SK Bagbin, vehemently decried President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo’s recently implemented landmark fee-free Senior High School Policy Initiative.

Of course, I am fully and perfectly aware of the fact that Mr. Buah secured his former cabinet portfolio, far less on the basis of merit or professional qualifications than on the invidious fact of him being of Nzema sub-Akan ethnicity, in much the same manner that nearly every one of the Board Members of the Mahama-constituted Savannah Accelerated Development Authority (SADA) had to be of some specific ethnic descriptions and must have originated from certain exclusive regions in the country, to qualify for their handsomely salaried taxpayer-funded jobs. As well, more than several of the northern-descended Mahama cabinet appointees were ceded their portfolios primarily on the basis of thoroughgoing nepotism rather than pure merit.

At any rate, the critically-thinking reader gets the unmistakable impression that Mr. Buah did not really have much that was substantive or politically significant to write about, except for obviously letting it be known to his Ellembele constituents, in the Western Region, that he was still around and had, in fact, not been expelled from Parliament, as some of them might have picked up from the grapevine. In the main, there is not much that is worthwhile in his article, except to bitterly and, to be certain, vacuously complain about the fact that it has taken the Akufo-Addo government of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) some two years to streamline the country’s energy grid and supply system. This is rather frivolous, because virtually no Ghanaian citizen is complaining about “Dumsor,” the widespread erratic power supply that gained global notoriety for the Mahama regime for some four-and-half years.

In the meantime, this NPP government has succeeded in cleaning up most of the humongous mess left behind by the Mahama Posse, including the far more intelligent and constructive renegotiation of the scandalously brokered AMERI-Deal and the revival of the Kufuor-initiated National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), which these profligate and kleptocratic apostles of Cash-and-Carry healthcare-policy ideology had literally run aground.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
January 4, 2019
E-mail: [email protected]