Alhaji Banda Has Only One Vote

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

Garden City, New York

Dec. 21, 2015

E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

Alhaji Asuma Banda is unarguably one of the most renowned and distinguished businessmen in Ghana. But he is not in a class all by himself. No. not by any stretch of the imagination. There are other equally distinguished entrepreneurs in the country, both among the members of Nana Akufo-Addo’s clan and the rest of the nation at large. We must also quickly add that among the very ranks of the membership, supporters and sympathizers of the country’s main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) is a critical mass of distinguished Ghanaians in all fields of endeavor who have not once or twice, but thrice, elected the former Attorney-General and Minister of Justice to run for the Presidency.

We are also well aware of the fact that Nana Akufo-Addo did not succeed to the Presidency in 2012 not essentially because he lacked the “intelligence, wisdom and structure” that Mr. Banda claims to be the case, but primarily because of the flagrant and downright criminal bloating of our National Voters’ Register. And then significantly, it is worthy of note that in the wake of the 2012 Presidential Election, the General-Secretary of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC), Mr. Johnson Asiedu-Nketia (aka General Mosquito), categorically confessed to the media that then-Transitional President John Dramani Mahama won the election because key operatives and polling agents of the New Patriotic Party had not been vigilant enough to effectively police votes cast in favor of the NPP.

Maybe this is what he means when Alhaji Asuma Banda carps Nana Akufo-Addo for supposedly lacking the requisite “intelligence, wisdom and structure” to manage the affairs of the country. The fact of the matter is that Nana Akufo-Addo is widely known to have far more creditably acquitted himself as President Kufuor’s cabinet appointee than either the late President John Evans Atta-Mills or the now-President John Dramani Mahama, the Chief-Architect of the “Shit-Bombing” anti-media blitzkrieg smugly chaperoned by Chairman Jerry John Rawlings.

Even any toddler living in Ghana presently knows that the going is extremely tough; and also that this is primarily due to the fact of the gross administrative incompetence of the pathologically lying and scheming Mahama-led government of the National Democratic Congress. And even as Ms. Rachel Appoh, the NDC-Member of Parliament for Gomoa-Central and former Deputy Minister for Gender and Social Protection, recently attested in the wake of the NDC parliamentary primaries, her own constituents had to be generously bribed in order not to overwhelmingly vote to reject the presidential re-nomination of Mr. Mahama.

And so, really, when Alhaji Asuma Banda recently impugned the intelligence and integrity of the three-time New Patriotic Party’s Presidential Candidate, he clearly did so out of acute desperation rather than sheer malice, as East Awutu-Senya NPP-Member of Parliament Mavis Hawa Koomson sought to cast it. The good news here, though, is that when it comes to brass-tacks, as it were, like every other Ghanaian citizen, Alhaji Banda has only one vote. And that one vote is highly unlikely to save his favorite presidential-race steed, Mr. Mahama, from certain defeat.

Indeed, it would have been quite refreshing and progressive for Alhaji Banda to have sanguinely promised to be eagerly looking forward to casting his ballot in favor of the man widely credited with having introduced the cellphone into the country. But, needless to say, at the end of the day, his rather unfortunate decision not to vote for Nana Akufo-Addo is inescapably integral to and a resounding approval of the NPP Presidential Candidate’s foresighted crafting of the Repeal of the infamous Criminal Libel Law, which has made it healthily possible for even superannuated octogenarians like Alhaji Asuma Banda to cavalierly presume to question the “intelligence, wisdom and ‘structure’” of Nana Akufo-Addo, for whatever these insolent epithets may be worth.