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The Virus of Partisan Tribalism Is Deeply Encoded in the DNA of John Mahama

Feature Article John Mahama - Former President
APR 24, 2020 LISTEN
John Mahama - Former President

Nobody should be surprised to learn that the Mahama team of COVID-19 Medical Experts was constituted solely and exclusively for the partisan electioneering promotion of his 2020 presidential campaign, as reliably revealed by Mr. Razak Kojo Opoku, the Founding-President of the Concerned Voters’ Movement (CVM) – (See “CVM Condemns John Mahama for Donating Food on Partisan Lines” Modernghana.com 4/21/20). Just because he was once, through the fatal flaw of then-Candidate John Evans Atta-Mills, late, elected President of Ghana does not necessarily mean that Mr. John Dramani Mahama is capable of acquiring the enviable skills or professional qualities of a statesman. You see, this innately and patently uncouth and generously uncivilized man will never be able to healthily cultivate the conciliatory and enviable skills of a statesman. Those skills are simply much too polished and burdensome for the man whose raison d’etre for assuming the mantle of political leadership was to extort and appropriate the wealth and resources of our country for the exclusive benefit of himself, his family members and cronies and a few political associates and cronies.

From Mr. Kojo Opoku, we reliably learn that the former President has charged his COVID-19 Medical Team with the distribution of basic food items like rice and beans and other canned foods to only Ghanaian citizens who provide ID cards indicating that, indeed, they are dues-paying bona fide members of the Jerry John Rawlings-founded National Democratic Congress (NDC). One would have thought that the bloody, old butcher and self-styled revolutionary would come out to publicly condemn this nation-wrecking and the inexcusably criminal practice of partisan politics in the catastrophic wake of the emergency season of the Coronavirus Pandemic that has literally swept through the overwhelming majority of countries around the world. Instead, what Ghanaians have experienced is the bloody butcher’s own daughter and piratical parliamentarian shamelessly and unconscionably accusing the hardworking and charitably inclusive leaders of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) of doing the same thing that the CVM’s Mr. Kojo Opoku has reliably accused the Mahama Posse of being exclusively culpable of.

But, of course, there is a significant difference in the fact that the Concerned Voters’ Movement’s leader has provided the general Ghanaian public with at least one readily verifiable evidence to back up his claim of Mr. Mahama’s criminally and pathologically partisan policy of distributing relief items and supplies to Ghanaian citizens on the basis of political party affiliation and/or membership. And that one verifiable instance is that of 60-year-old Maame Ama Nimoh, a widow of the Ashaiman Township of Accra, in the Greater-Accra Region, who was callously denied a Mahama-underwritten food consignment because the poor woman’s preteen daughter was allegedly heard singing a popular song composed by Daddy Lumba, the famous Ghanaian singer and musician, celebrating the fee-free Akufo-Addo-initiated Senior High School System. Which is rather ironic, because Mr. Mahama is widely known to share another favorite musical composition by Daddy Lumba titled “Yenntie Obiara,” a dancehall favorite, with His Majesty, The Asantehene, Otumfuo Osei-Tutu, II.

It is ironic but scarcely surprising because the Daddy Lumba number celebrating the fee-free Senior High School Policy Initiative has President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo as its subject of encomiums, whereas “Yenntie Obiara” is widely suspected to have either directly or obliquely been composed by Daddy Lumba in support of the then-President Mahama’s widely alleged tone-deaf leadership of the country from 2012 to 2017. Dear Reader, you see, for the now-Candidate John Dramani Mahama, raw and crude narcissism and acute megalomania are a deft combination of what constitutes the vintage politician. Doubtlessly, at another time and in another country more functionally democratic, the members of the Mahama-constituted COVID-19 Team of Medical Experts, so-called, would have been promptly disciplined by their professional association or union for so flagrantly and criminally violating their Hippocratic Oath of providing their curative services without any show of bias or regard for the political or ideological and ethnic affiliation of any patient or citizen in dire need of such emergency assistance. And the Mahama-constituted COVID-19 Team of Medical Experts itself would have since long been dissolved. But, of course, we only live in Fourth-Republican Ghana, where opposition-fomented chaos and anarchy, verging on downright anomie, are deemed to be the very linchpin of constitutional democracy.

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

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
April 23, 2020
E-mail: [email protected]

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