George Yankah, Mahama Is Not Coming to Power, Period – Part One

For the kind of insipid propaganda guff, and bunk, that the author delivers in the dubious name of the purported leadership competence and/or foresight of former President John Dramani Mahama, Mr. George Yankah’s prolix – or vacuously long article – captioned “Sam Okudzeto Must Withdraw His Wise Counsel and Resign from the Council of State” (Modernghana.com 4/21/20), does not deserve even a split-second attention of any intelligent and reasonably well-educated Ghanaian citizen who knows how to profitably spend his or her precious time. Plus, this largely fecal fare of a prolix, in the classical sense of the term, has absolutely nothing significant or relevant to do with the venerable legal luminary whose name is sensationally used in the caption, to wit, Mr. Sam Okudzeto/ OKudjeto. The writer merely brought the name of the former President of the Ghana Bar Association (GBA) along for the ride, as it were; that is, along for the purely rhetorical mileage or traction that this famous and distinguished name appears to promise by way of a remarkably wide readership.

As the author, a virulently anti-Akufo-Addo and New Patriotic Party critic, tells it, recently, Mr. Okudzeto was widely reported to have counseled the administrators of Ghana’s Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) to proceed with the compilation of the new National Biometric Voters’ Register (NBVR) in areas around the country where the impact of the Coronavirus Pandemic had been ascertained by our health and medical experts to be significantly low or negligible. It unmistakably appears that it was the author’s fury at this all-too-savvy counsel that prompted Mr. Yankah to write and publish his asinine tirade. You see, Dear Reader, the fact of the matter is that Parliament has already debated and approved of the imperative need for the compilation of a New Biometric Voters’ Register, as well as having duly voted a budgetary spending for this project or exercise. So, really, it is only a comedian or clinically certified madman who would casually suppose that, somehow, the mere composition and publication of a protest rant would cause any sea change of a reversal of this definitive decision by the noble representatives, for the most part, of our National Assembly that has also already been duly ratified by the Akufo-Addo Presidency.

We must also emphasize the indisputable fact that the compilation of the new National Biometric Voters’ Register was never about cost or expenditure; rather, it has always been squarely about the validity and authenticity of Ghanaian democracy, over which absolutely no price tag may be deemed to be too high to pay, contrary to what charlatanic propaganda shills and mega-kleptocrats of the National Democratic Congress would have the rest of us bona fide Ghanaian citizens believe. You see, Mr. Okudzeto merely added his knowledge, experience and wisdom to a matter that has already been conclusively settled. What also amused me in no small measure, among the characteristically quixotic and pontifical claims of author George Yankah, is this criminally farcical idea that, somehow, the Ghanaian electorate voted former President John Dramani Mahama into office in December 2012 – actually, it was the Atuguba-presided panel of Supreme Court jurists that literally gifted the then-Interim President Mahama the substantive Presidency of the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana – so that the former Atta-Mills’ Arch-Lieutenant would put up several uncompleted projects, such as empty facades of hospitals and health centers in order for his successors to come and complete the same.

No such logic or trend of reasoning could be more pointedly absurd. There are two responses to such paralogical reasoning, and they have to do with the fact that political goons and hirelings like Mr. George Yankah clearly do not know or understand what they are talking about. First of all, neither Messrs. Mahama nor Akufo-Addo, as yours truly vividly remembers, campaigned for the Presidency in 2012 on the policy platform or agenda of completing all the development projects either left uncompleted or totally abandoned by their predecessor or predecessors. Consequently, were he an intelligent propagandist, Mr. Yankah would have begun his wastefully long article by listing the number of John Agyekum-Kufuor-left or uncompleted projects that the Mills-Mahama regime took up and completed. I am here, of course, referring to the infamous “Asante Projects” and the “Akyem” projects as well.

You see, Dear Reader, it is blasphemously preposterous for anybody to suppose that, somehow, the primary constitutional obligation of President Akufo-Addo is to pick up after Mr. John Dramani Mahama but that, somehow, the Bole-Bamboi native who cannot even tell the nation the specific set of circumstances under which his immediate predecessor, to wit, then-President John Evans Atta-Mills, met his death, had absolutely no inalienable constitutional obligation to complete projects left behind by the Agyekum-Kufuor-led government of the New Patriotic Party. It is also tantamount to a capital offense for Mr. Yankah to claim that all the progressive social-intervention programs put in place by Nana Akufo-Addo, to significantly meliorate the deleterious impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic, were actually crafted by the man who sat duck at the Presidency in 2014 while a common hygiene-related virus like cholera effectively took over our country and literally wiped out tens of thousands of precious Ghanaian lives, including at least one medical doctor and dozens of students at the nation’s foremost tertiary academy for the training of some of our most talented and brightest educators. But then, again, whoever accused Mr. Mahama of ever having any soft spot for our country’s teachers and nurses?

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

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
April 22, 2020
E-mail: [email protected]