By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
October 6, 2016
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
As the December 7 Day-of-Reckoning inexorably dawns on them, the leaders of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) have plunged themselves into panic mode. Now, having miserably failed to pooh-pooh the genius of the Oxbridge-educated Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, these desperate societal sponges and thoroughgoing economic parasites have resorted to earnestly pleading with the former Deputy-Governor of the Bank of Ghana to “return to his roots” (See “NDC Paid Bawumia’s School Fees – Limuna Alleges” 3News.com / Ghanaweb.com 10/3/16).
The fact of the matter is that even if the National Democratic Congress, as the extant ruling government, footed the bill for the college education of the three-time Vice-Presidential Candidate of the country’s main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), Dr. Bawumia would still be smack-dab within his alienable human and democratic rights not to in any way feel beholden to the NDC machine operatives. For starters, whatever monies might have been used in the form of scholarship to sponsor the college education of the distinguished son of Alhaji Mumuni Bawumia, late, came directly from the coffers of the Ghanaian taxpayer, and not the kitty of the NDC as a political party or organization.
Thus it is criminally disingenuous for party stalwarts like Mr. Abdallah Abubakar, the Northern Regional Minister, and Mr. Inusah Fuseini, the Roads and Highways Minister, to presume to lecture Dr. Bawumia on the proverbial anathema, or taboo, subject of biting the hand of one’s benefactor. Needless to say, the prime target of such vitriol and gratuitous NDC abuse fully recognizes this incontrovertible fact, thus the laudable and inescapably noble decision by the Simon Fraser University scholar to evenhandedly call the shots as he sees them and let the proverbial chips fall where they may.
It is also rather pathetic, to speak much less of the downright paradoxical, for the very people who have been quixotically grandstanding about the professional caliber and integrity of Dr. Bawumia, and how the latter needed to be lectured on the rudiments of elementary economics, to be desperately screaming for the younger Alhaji Bawumia to “rejoin” their fold. The fact of the matter is that his father’s well-known political trucking with the leadership of the National Democratic Congress notwithstanding, in reality, Dr. Bawumia was never a bona fide member or operative of the party of butchers, kleptocrats and troglodytes. The NDC’s desperate call must be seen for what it indisputably is, a visceral declaration of the massive failure as well as the landslide defeat of the Mahama-led government of the National Democratic Congress in the lead-up to election 2016.
But even more pointedly, the decision by Dr. Bawumia to consistently truck with the progressive and foresighted leadership of the New Patriotic Party clearly indicates that the Distinguished Visiting Professor of the Otabil-founded Central University College is his own man. Dr. Bawumia, unlike most of the NDC leadership, is not afflicted with the sort of herd mentality that has been making it extremely difficult for our beloved nation to elect the most dynamic and visionary Ghanaian citizens to manage the affairs of the country. Hopefully, come December 7, sanity will prevail and ensure that Ghana get blessed with the kind of honest and creative leadership it direly needs to move the country up on the economic ladder into the respectable company of prosperous nations like Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Indonesia.
The fact of the matter is that Dr. Bawumia crossed the Rubicon more than a decade ago, and there is absolutely no reason, whatsoever, for any NDC apparatchik to suppose that he is in any way, shape or form desirous of trucking with the most regressive and morally reprehensible and irreparably bankrupt leadership anywhere in the postcolonial world.
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