Ghanaian Opposition Confused by COVID-19 Lockdown Lift

Ghana’s President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo may easily be the best informed non-specialist citizen and leader on the ravaging dynamics of the globally raging Coronavirus Pandemic, for the obvious reason that the former Foreign and Sub-Regional Integration Minister has at his ready disposal the knowledge and expertise of the best and brightest Ghanaian scientists and COVID-19 experts, both at home and abroad, as well as the knowledge and expertise of such globally renowned COVID-19 watchdogs as the United Nations-sponsored World Health Organization (WHO). So it simply could not be that Nana Akufo-Addo’s decision, just within the last 24 hours, to lift the partial lockdowns of the two largest and most significant cities in the country, namely, Ghana’s capital of Accra, and the Asante Region’s Kumasi Metropolis, was somehow, based on a complete lack of the relevant scientific data or abject and total ignorance (See “Is Ghana Right to Ease Lockdown? – BBC Report” Ghanaweb.com 4/20/20).

At any rate, in the face of the fierce battle launched by the key operatives of the Akufo-Addo-led government of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) to fight off the COVID-19 Pandemic, the leaders of the country’s main opposition party, the National Democratic Congress (NDC), were strategically and tactically engaged in the deliberately orchestrated campaign of accusing the government of having neglected the reported outbreak of Cerebrospinal Meningitis (CSM) in one of the 16 administrative regions of the country, namely, the Upper-West Region, one of the electoral strongholds of the main opposition National Democratic Congress, in obvious hopes of deviously ensuring that the rate of the spread of the COVID-19 Pandemic would skyrocket and effectively overwhelm the Akufo-Addo government, so as to give the hopelessly trailing and unprecedently incompetent former President and, presently, the main opposition Presidential Candidate, Mr. John Dramani Mahama, a fighting chance in the upcoming December General Election.

In the last 2016 General Election, the then-Candidate Akufo-Addo handily defeated an incumbent President Mahama by more than One-Million Votes. By all reliable expert media accounts, the now-President Akufo-Addo is poised to defeat his main political opponent, this time around, by an even greater margin of the ballot, as authoritatively predicted by Chairman Jerry John Rawlings, the acclaimed Founding-Father of the country’s main opposition National Democratic Congress and longtime strongman and two-term elected President of Ghana. Mr. Rawlings has been widely quoted to have admonished the leaders of the National Democratic Congress to forget about any possibility of winning back power in December 2020 and, instead, more realistically focus on the December 2024 General Election.

Chairman Rawlings ought to know what he is talking about. Not only has former President Mahama not been able, in nearly eight years, to officially inform the Ghanaian people about precisely under what circumstances his then immediate boss and substantive President of the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana, to wit, then-President John Evans Atta-Mills, met his death, even more disturbingly, just within the short temporal span of the last two months alone, two seismic scandals, respectively, involving the purchase of aircraft and energy supply, have rocked the 2020 Mahama Presidential Campaign. In both cases, the collective payola sum of at least $ 10 Million (USD), $ 5Million (UDS) a piece, was negotiated under the books or illegally by some assigns and representatives of the then-President John Dramani Mahama, with both cases of criminally culpable acts of bribery having been literally exposed by globally authoritative sources, namely, the Serious Fraud Court of London, UK, and the latter’s American counterpart in Washington, DC, in a mega-scam involving the largest aircraft manufacturing company in Europe, namely, European Airbus SE.

In the second instance of the felonious defrauding of the Ghanaian taxpayer, the executives of a Turkey-based energy-generating and distributing company by the name of AKSA, reportedly shelled out approximately $ 5 Million (USD) to secure a lucrative contract in Ghana. This was during the industrially bleak and blighted period of the Presidency of Mr. Mahama that globally and infamously came to be known as “Dumsor,” marked by perennial power outages that resulted in the permanent collapse of at least one-third of privately owned small- and medium-sized Ghanaian businesses. The preceding is the High Definition (HD) profile of the Ground-Zero critics who would have the global community believe that under the unprecedently progressive and economically successful Pre-COVID-19 tenure of President Akufo-Addo, ironically, Ghanaians are, somehow, being afforded a raw deal.

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

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
April 20, 2020
E-mail: [email protected]