How many hospitals did Mahama equip?

Not very long ago, when Mr Alexander Kofi Mensah Mould’s daughter took seriously ill, the former Executive- or Managing-Director of the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC), did not take his daughter Naa Densua to any of the so-called state-of-the-art John Dramani Mahama-constructed hospitals in the country. The young woman would tragically die in quarantine in the Indian Ocean-located African country of The Seychelles. Ms Mould’s case is very likely the very first officially reported and recorded death from the China-originated Coronavirus Pandemic. It occurred at about the same time that the death of Mr Daniel Batidam, the infamous Mahama corruption-enabling adviser on corruption was reported at Akuapem-Mampong, in the Eastern Region, where this National Democratic Congress’ “strategic rascal” was reported to have been receiving alternative medical treatment for quite some time. So, obviously, the passing of Mr Batidam makes it very likely the second official Coronavirus death to have been reported by the media in Ghana on January 1, 2020.

Now, if any Fourth Republican Ghanaian leader could be aptly accused of not having thought responsibly and respectfully about the average Ghanaian citizen and voter, as some of these rascally operatives of the main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) would have Ghanaians believe, that crassly incompetent leader is obviously none other than Candidate John Dramani Mahama, Ghana’s immediate-past President, and not President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, the country’s Fifth Fourth-Republican democratically elected leader, contrary to what Efo Worlanyo Tsekpo sought to imply in the latter writer’s article titled “Think of the Voter Mr President” (Ghanaweb.com 4/2/20). It was the then-President John Dramani Mahama who, in the leadup to the 2016 general election, sternly warned ordinary Ghanaian citizens, that is, the very voters who had offered him the mandate to govern them in 2012, that absolutely none of these law-abiding and hardworking and very thoughtful bona fide Ghanaian citizens had any right to criticize Mr Mahama’s inescapably dismal job performance because, even as the Bole-Bamboi, Savannah Region, native imperiously asserted at the time, none of these citizens had ever been privileged enough to have been elected to serve as either President or even Vice-President of the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana.

Mr Mahama would extend his stern warning further to include his two most formidable political opponents, namely, the then-Candidate Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo and the latter’s economically savvy running-mate and former Deputy-Governor of the nation’s Central Treasury, to wit, the Bank of Ghana, and at the time the New Patriotic Party’s Vice-Presidential Candidate, Alhaji Mahamudu Bawumia. Well, as the sometime Atta-Mills’ arch-lieutenant smugly cast matters, about the only Ghanaian citizens who rightfully qualified and could be aptly considered to be the political peers and/or classmates of Little Dramani were Chairman Jeremiah (Jerry) John Rawlings, the former President and Ghana’s longest-ruling junta leader and the acclaimed Founding-Father of the National Democratic Congress.

The man who is widely alleged to have instructed all Ghanaians of northern descent and/or ethnicity never to ever fathom casting their ballots for a southern “Kabonga” native-like then-Candidate Akufo-Addo, unless, of course, they had been either declared or clinically certified by a professional psychologist or a psychiatrist to be crazy or pathological buffoons, would also reckon former President John Agyekum-Kufuor to be the second of his only two peers and classmates on Ghana’s political arena or terrain. “How can Akufo-Addo and Bawumia presume to criticize my job performance as the first post-independence born Ghanaian President? These two guys have absolutely no clue what it really means to be President of Ghana. They have absolutely no practical experience at the job,” Mr. Mahama would be widely quoted by the media to have said about his two most formidable rivals in the runup to the 2016 Presidential Election.

I bet my proverbial bottom-dollar that Efo Worlanyo Tsekpo was banking on the carcinogenically short memory of the average Ghanaian voter when he conveniently neglected to present his readers with the foregoing veritable and verifiable character profile of the man who would have the very bona fide Ghanaian voters on whose faces and pates he so meanspiritedly spat, pissed and defecated return him to Jubilee House for the second nonconsecutive time around. Indeed, if he were also honest and respectful of his readers, Mr Worlanyo Tsekpo or Tsekpo Worlanyo would have also noted the fact that it was former President John Dramani Mahama who effectively bankrupted the Agyekum-Kufuor-established National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), and then desperately and mischievously turned round and farcically attempted to scapegoat his own personally hand-picked appointee for the job of Executive-Director of the National Health Insurance Authority (NHIA), namely, Mr Sylvester Mensah.

The grapevine even had it that Mr Mensah had flatly refused to thievishly siphon funds earmarked for the operational solvency of the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) into the 2016 Presidential Reelection Campaign of then-President Mahama. You see, a genuine builder of user-friendly hospitals would definitely have also ensured that the average Ghanaian voter would be availed the requisite viable health insurance incentive to readily access the so-called Mahama-built hospitals. Then also, Mr Worlanyo Tsekpo also failed to inform his readers that a President who hawkishly and summarily denied Nurse-Trainees their age-old established allowances was not really interested in having these hospitals fully staffed by well-qualified nurses and doctors. The question also needs to be asked about precisely how many already trained nurses and doctors the Mahama-led government of the National Democratic Congress either hired or fully employed.

Then, also, who set our National Medical Stores on fire, in the wake of the seismic trouncing of then-President Mahama in the 2016 Presidential Polls by then-Candidate Akufo-Addo? Efo Worlanyo Tsekpo may, obviously, be able to fool himself about the leadership heft, substance and competence of Little Dramani; but, needless to say, this Akufo-Addo critic would have a hard time trying to fool the rest of us politically savvy and wide awake bona fide Ghanaian citizens, voters and non-voters alike.

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

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

English Department,

SUNY-Nassau Garden City, New York

E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net