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06.04.2020 Feature Article

Who Is Being Childish Here?

Who Is Being Childish Here?
06.04.2020 LISTEN

When the issue of his former Presidential Assistant, in the authoritative words of Second-Deputy Parliamentary Speaker Alban SK Bagbin, not showing up for Ghana’s 63rd Independence Anniversary Celebration in the Asante Regional Capital of Kumasi came up recently, Mr. Stanislav Xoese Dogbe snidely riposted that his former nominal boss and Ghana’s former President, at least on paper, John Dramani Mahama, did not show his face at the Baba Yara Sports Stadium, or wherever in the Kumasi Metropolis the most recent independence anniversary festivities were held, because it was an open secret that President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo did not feel comfortable in any public place or forum wherever the Savannah Region’s most prominent native was also scheduled to be present.

Now, I don’t know whether this curiously perceived discomfort is either the peculiar and capricious figment of the imagination of Messrs. Mahama and Dogbe or, perhaps, it has something to do with the apparent coverup of the brutal bedroom slaying of Mr. Joseph Boakye Danquah-Adu, the Akufo-Addo cousin who, at the time of his grisly assassination, was the New Patriotic Party’s Member of Parliament for Akyem-Abuakwa-North Constituency, in the Eastern Region. Neither do I find myself tempted to speculate as such. One might plausibly, however, be tempted to conclude that in reality, the former President had never felt fit or comfortable with the highly sensitive post and mantle of the Presidency, as was scandalously and unmistakably witnessed by all Ghanaians, both at home and abroad, on March 6, 2016, when the official Mahama Presidential Communications Director, that is, Mr. Stanislav Xoese Dogbe, himself, deliberately substituted the name of Kenya’s President Uhuru Kenyatta for that of then-President John Dramani Mahama, the man who was supposed to have hosted the former.

Maybe it was a Freudian Slip; even so, such egregious error could not have been readily or facilely chalked up to one of genuine oversight, because Mr. Dogbe and his oversized platoon of Presidential Staffers had months to put their program together. Very likely, it was the characteristically veritable and vintage product of the much-remarked gross incompetence of the Mahama Presidency and regime at large. What I am here clearly driving at is the very obvious fact that it is rather Mr. Mahama who feels great discomfort at every possibility or chance of conferring with the man who is widely believed to have mercilessly trounced him in the 2012 presidential poll, but whose solid and convincing victory was first rudely snatched from him by the then-Chairman of Ghana’s Electoral Commission, to wit, Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan, and shortly thereafter by the William Atuguba-presided panel of the Wood Supreme Court.

Unfortunately, in the 2016 Presidential Election, the political demons of the Bole-Bamboi-born former Rawlings’s “Shit-Bombing” Communications Minister caught up with this hatchet man. At the country’s most recent Independence-Day Anniversary, it was very predictable that if Kenya’s President Uhuru Kenyatta did not chance to pinch-hit for Little Dramani, it was highly unlikely that the man who just late last year had the temerity to call The Asantehene, Otumfuo Osei-Tutu, II, a pathological liar before the global community would be able to show his face in Kumasi, all the theatrically staged bouts of post-facto mea culpas to the contrary notwithstanding.

It is also inexcusably preposterous for Mr. Dogbe to suggest that just because the letter inviting the former President to Jubilee House for a crunch meeting with Nana Akufo-Addo over the COVID-19 Pandemic had been addressed to Mr. Johnson Asiedu-Nketia, the General-Secretary of the National Democratic Congress, does not in any way negate the gravity or urgency or the significance of such invitation, although it is also quite understandable for the former President and his minions and hangers-on to have felt somewhat slighted by such invitational indirection. But it is also very likely that a grossly incompetent former President John Dramani Mahama had been caught flatfooted or completely off-guard by this invitation and might have predictably and royally embarrassed himself, because the peanut-brained megalomaniac had absolutely nothing substantive to contribute to this national emergency, besides buying a few supplies of PPEs to kickstart his fast-fizzling electioneering campaign.

We know the preceding for a fact because recently, when Mr. Mahama held a press conference in his office, the proposals that he reportedly offered for solving the COVID-19 Pandemic were, each and every one of them, already being implemented by President Akufo-Addo and his blue-ribbon team of progressive and visionary cabinet and executive operatives of the ruling New Patriotic Party.

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

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
April 5, 2020
E-mail: [email protected]

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