By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
What is remarkable about the Mahama-Arthur Campaign for Election 2012 is the predictably abject lack of any comprehensive and sustainable policy agenda, short of shamelessly playing on the sentiments of the emotionally aggrieved people of the Central Region, who appear to have become the prime and expedient target of an electorally desperate President Mahama (See “ ‘God Has Already Ordained NDC to Win the 2012 Elections’ – President Mahama Vibeghana.com 9/15/12).
Indeed, what his most formidable political opponents ought to be relentlessly highlighting is the grim and morally galling fact that had Mr. Kennedy Ohene Agyepong, a New Patriotic Party (NPP) parliamentarian who also hails from the Central Region, not auspiciously exposed the brazenly collaborative fleecing of the Ghanaian taxpayer by the Mills-Mahama “Better Ghana Agenda” government, in the landmark matter of the criminal disbursement of a humongous ? 51 million (Cedi)-plus judgment-debt payout to Mr. Alfred Agbesi Woyome, Ghanaians would still be in the dark about this most heinous racket which has been described as, perhaps, the single largest official bilking of the Ghanaian taxpayer in our entire postcolonial history.
Anyway, in what was dubbed as a “whistle-stop” campaign tour of Agona-Swedru, recently (on his way to a festival celebration in Nyarkrom), Mr. Mahama could only, reportedly, harp on the remarkable (actually polite) reception accorded him in the wake of the death of President John Evans Atta-Mills, almost as if all that mattered to the people of the region which Mr. Mahama has, personally, described as being among the bottom three most underdeveloped in the nation, was the Bole-Bamboi native’s accidental accession to the presidency which, of course, until a little over two months ago, had been occupied by a native of the region who had not even been born in the Central Region, and does not appear to have established any deep roots among his ancestral clansmen and women.
Matters were also not helped when the Central Regional Minister, Ms. Ama Benyiwa Doe, took to the podium and admonished eligible voters in the region to massively line up behind her boss, merely because President Mahama had deigned to select one of their own, Mr. Kwesi Bekoe Amissah-Arthur, the former Governor of the Bank of Ghana, as his running-mate for Election 2012. Needless to say, Vice-President Amissah-Arthur is neither the first nor even the second Fante native to be selected for the post. In other words, what both Mr. Mahama and Ms. Benyiwa Doe ought to have highlighted should have been the development track-record of the National Democratic Congress in the Central Region, and why returning the ruling party to the seat of governance would redound to the benefit of not only the people and citizens of the Central Region, but the nation at large.
Ghanaians as a whole, including both potential and eligible voters of the Central Region, ought to be asking serious and far-reaching questions about the patently expedient and flagrantly un-presidential and un-statesmanlike decision of President Mahama to make a special campaign case and issue out of the home-region of the late President Mills, when it is all-too-obvious that the entire nation – and virtually each and every one of the ten regions constituting the Republic of Ghana – is in dire need of massive socioeconomic and cultural development and modernization.
*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is Director of The Sintim-Aboagye Center for Politics and Culture and author of “Ghanaian Politics Today” (Lulu.com, 2005). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net.
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