Courting Yemeni terrorists is no good policy, Mr. Anyidoho

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

Garden City, New York

Feb. 6, 2016

E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

The Deputy NDC General-Secretary is not telling Ghanaian voters the unvarnished truth, and so we have decided to come out to boldly, no-holds-barred, to remind eligible and prospective voters what they may already know or be acutely aware of. Up till now, Mr. Koku Anyidoho has not been able to tell Ghanaians precisely how President John Evans Atta-Mills met his death, except to occasionally jive about how he has been speaking to the late president in his dreams and how his “mysteriously vanished” former boss has been smiling and saying that he is hale-and-hearty wherever he presently finds himself.

In essence, the former Atta-Mills Communications Director has been completely AWOL (Absent Without Leave) where it matters most. At least, thanks to Mr. Kwadwo Owusu-Afriyie (aka Sir John), Ghanaians know that Mr. Jake Otanka Obetsebi-Lamptey, the former New Patriotic Party Chairman, died of leukemia at a London hospital, and was not expediently removed from the scene by a wisdom-filled Divine Providence to make way for the first post-independence-born Ghanaian leader, to wit, President John Uhuru Mahama Kenyatta.

They know they have done absolutely nothing to improve the quality of life of the average Ghanaian citizen, and so now the key operatives of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) have resorted to the use of “Reverse Psychology.” In this new characteristically devious approach, the primary message of Mr. Johnson Asiedu-Nketia (aka General Mosquito) is that the Mahama-led government of the National Democratic Congress may have failed royally, but the alternative is even worse. And that alternative, according to Mr. Anyidoho, is, of course, the Akufo-Addo-led New Patriotic Party (NPP).

The uphill task that the cross-dressing Mahama shill and his goon have with this tacky electioneering campaign tack is that the NPP has an enviable track-record of palpable performance to show the Ghanaian electorate, one that was laudably established by former President John Agyekum-Kufuor, and a performance record that has absolutely no match among the three National Democratic Congress-sponsored presidents who have ruled in Ghana’s Fourth Republic, namely, Chairman Jerry John Rawlings, John Evans Atta-Mills and, of course, John Dramana Mahami of Kenya. Excuse me, Aberdeen.

Virtually every humanistic national development program being currently pursued by the National Democratic Congress was originally established by the Kufuor-led New Patriotic Party, from the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) to the School-Feeding Program (SFP), which one impudent Mahama hack recently attempted to claim for unarguably the most administratively bankrupt political party in postcolonial Ghanaian history. To date, all that the Mahama Posse has succeeded in doing has been to corruptly grind the efficacy of these quality-of-life-enhancing programs to a screeching halt, and then luridly and shamelessly fault the programs’ originators for the same.

What is also significant to highlight here is the fact that at nearly every turn in the initiation of these salutary social interventionist programs, the NDC leaders have pooh-poohed their feasibility and viability only to opportunistically position themselves as the prime beneficiaries of the same. The striking of crude oil deposits off the continental shelf of Cape-Three-Points, in the Western Region, is a ready case in point.

Then also, we have the Kufuor-minted financial relief program for the poor, the very old and nursing mothers which has been criminally mismanaged to the detriment of its prime beneficiaries. Even when funds have been made available for development programs, such as GYEEDA, SUBAH and GUBAH, the abject lack of talent, responsibility and creative initiative and imagination among the NDC leadership has ensured that such programs would literally go to waste. In the case of GYEEDA, as with most of the other programs, the direct cause of massive failure was tribalism, perhaps the most effective policy-killing tool in the arsenal of the Mahama-led government of the National Democratic Congress.

The latest policy rage and craze of the Mahama government is the covertly negotiated resettlement of certified high-risk Arab terrorists formerly protectively incarcerated at the U.S. Naval Base at Cuba’s Guantanamo Bay in Ghana by President Mahama. At the same time that he has been busily and exuberantly hosting Yemeni terrorists in the country, Mr. Mahama has been sternly warning the very citizens who offered him his leadership mandate to shut up and studiously go about their daily chores and other occupational responsibilities, if all they have to proffer his NDC government are criticisms, even constructive criticism.

Understandably, some of his detractors have suggested that the recent exposés undertaken by ace investigative journalist Mr. Anas Aremeyaw Anas, and his Tiger-Eye PI team, was deftly and opportunely and deliberately timed to coincide with the Gitmo Scandal. A publicly and thoroughly broken judiciary, the logic goes, offers a prime recipe for a conducive culture of silence. The Flagstaff House also has yet to inform Ghanaians precisely how much it raised in its no-bid tender for the production of the controversial presidential diaries.

In retrospect, the proverbial handwriting on the wall was always present for all to see. It was only a matter of time. In other words, the mantra of NDC operatives like Mr. Anyidoho is that if Ghanaians could consent to voting constitutionally indemnified terrorists to power, then it equally stands to reason that these same voters would gladly consent to have Gitmo terrorists play guest to the Mahama Posse. On the latter count, however, not even former Presidents Rawlings and Kufuor have any say or remarkable input to offer, according to the Gonja petty chieftain. Ghana, Uncle Atukwei, is a country in which we live in it! And this is the better alternative for which Mr. Anyidoho would have Ghanaians retain the Mahama-led National Democratic Congress at the Flagstaff House for another four years. Who said “Tofiakwa!!!”?

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