Mahama Started the Commotion

There is something repulsively disingenuous about the RainbowRadioOnline.com-generated news story that was published by the Ghanaweb.com website with the following caption: “Mahama Breaks Silence on Asantehene’s UN Address” (9/21/19). First of all, it was our protagonist and former President, Mr. John Dramani Mahama, who created the needless to-do or controversy around the otherwise brilliant and philosophically and morally edifying presentation by the Asantehene, His Majesty, Otumfuo Osei-Tutu, II, at the United Nations’-sponsored Forum on Culture and Peace in New York City recently. So it is rather oxymoronic for any media reporter or editor to suppose that the very subject who created the commotion would also be the same person who breaks his nonexistent silence. Ghanaian writers and editors need to take the craft of journalism more seriously or we may soon find ourselves as a laughingstock and the butt of jokes the world over.

Indeed, the one who really has yet to break his silence on this rather scandalously megalomaniacal and narcissistic to-do is definitely not the mischief-maker but the veritable victim, to wit, Otumfuo Osei-Tutu, II. He is the one whose dignity and globally recognized reputation have been torched or set alight by the Bole petty chieftain who, by his grandiose sense of self-importance, may very well have also brought the entire monarchical institution in the country into abject disrepute. This is pretty much in synch with the characteristic intolerance of the former President who once rudely instructed Ghanaian citizens and the electorate that they had absolutely no right, whatsoever, to question his abysmal job performance because none of them had ever been elected President of the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana.

There were only two exceptions to the Mahama edict, pontifically and imperiously handed down the then substantive Commander-in-Chief of the Ghana Armed Forces in the runup to the 2016 Presidential Election, namely, former Presidents Jerry John Rawlings and John Agyekum-Kufuor. The “Ghanawura” would also categorically instruct then-Candidates Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo and Mahamudu Bawumia, presently the President and Vice-President of the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana, respectively, that they least qualified to presume to either criticize or impugn his poor job performance. In sum, it is this insufferably autocratic lawgiver that the leaders of the country’s main opposition National Democratic Congress would have Ghanaians saddled with, once more, if they have their way come December 7, 2020. We should, all of us neoliberal and progressive Ghanaian citizens and voters, with one uniformed and resounding voice declare thus: “No way, Oga!”

What with the apocalyptic resurrection of Dumsor and the putdown insult to our intelligence that it is only the culturally and clinically lazy ones among us who woefully lack the creative capacity to devise innovative ways of successfully and prosperously doing business in the Golden Age that is Dumsor?! The pity here is the fact that a geo-ethnic chauvinist and northern supremacist politician like Comrade Mahama is able to get mercenary Kabonga butterballs like Mr. Julius Debrah, the convenient election-season Chief-of-Staff Substitute, to go to bat for him by doing the dirty work of an inveterate and a pathologically Akan-hating political scumbag like this secretly naturalized citizen of Dubai, the United Arab Emirates. I mean, looking at the sort of contractual no-brainer scam that was the ECG-PDS agreement, one is tempted to wonder whether Comrade Mahama were an Afro-Arab colonial administrator dispatched to Ghana on a scorched-earth mission of the total cannibalization and evisceration of the country’s economic and industrial development.

We witnessed the same noetic shenanigans in the AMERI racket which, unfortunately, drew the collusive worst out of perhaps the most trusted Akufo-Addo executive appointee and sometime electioneering campaign manager. Fortunately, that Siamese free-for-all scandalous past may be well behind us. We also know that the Mahama-SADA-Woyome-ASONGTABA scumbags are not coming back to power anytime soon. And, of course, that is all that seriously matters for now.

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

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
September 21, 2019
E-mail: [email protected]