Is Dumsor the buoyant NDC agenda?

The Cuban-trained veterinarian who just got elected as the National Women’s Organizer of the country’s main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) says that the four years of steeply erratic power supply, infamously called “Dumsor,” was the best and the most buoyant economic legacy bequeathed Ghanaians and the Akufo-Addo-led government of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) by the Mahama regime.

And, also, that Ghana’s former Foreign Minister and Attorney-General and Minister of Justice has thoroughly destroyed the country’s economy by ensuring the steady and uninterrupted supply of electricity and other energy resources throughout the country (See “Ghanaians Are Suffering Under Akufo-Addo – Hanna Bissiw” Modernghana.com 10/31/18).

You see, it is this kind of “political dyslexia” that is certain to ensure that the Rawlings-fangled and Mahama-chaperoned National Democratic Congress is going to languish on the sterile margins of the opposition for the foreseeably future. Maybe Dr. Hanna Bissiw would have remarkably courted the sympathy of at least the Mahama Amen Corner of cynical political scam-artists, if the former Deputy Minister of Food and Agriculture had provided some forensically viable statistical evidence to shore up her criticism of the Akufo-Addo Administration, which inherited an effectively bankrupt National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) and in less than a year was able to make this John Agyekum-Kufuor signature legacy viable and up and running again.

It is also quite obvious that Dr. Bissiw has been sleeping through the 21-month-old Akufo-Addo Administration; otherwise, she would have learned a thing or two about NABCO, the Nation Builders’ Corps Program, an unprecedented job-training and employment policy initiative which is poised to employing at least some 100,000 recent college and university graduates in both the private and public sectors of the country’s economy. You see, under the Mahama regime, the going concern was something called the Unemployed Graduates’ Association (UGA), with angry and perennially frustrated “air-dieting” members across all 10 regions of the country. Under the Mahama capstone policy initiative of Dumsor, about 40-percent of small- and medium-sized Ghanaian-owned businesses totally collapsed, and this is only conservatively speaking. So one wonders precisely when the former Deputy Housing Minister came to the grim realization that “joblessness is on the increase; [and] doctors, nurses, teachers, drivers, students, traders are all crying due to the economic hardship [that] they are saddled with at the moment.”

Dr. Bissiw would also do well to explain precisely how she lost her Tano-South Constituency seat to an operative of the Akufo-Addo-led New Patriotic Party. I am here, of course, alluding to widespread allegations of official corruption and lavish lifestyle at the expense of the Ghanaian taxpayer that were leveled against Ms. Bissiw in the runup to the 2016 general election. I bet Dr. Bissiw also never heard about the restoration of the nurse- and teacher-trainee allowances by Nana Akufo-Addo, which her former boss callously cut off so that Mr. Mahama could ensure the thievish drawing of double salaries for himself and the pathologically parasitic members of his cabinet, including, of course, Dr. Bissiw.

The newly elected NDC’s National Women’s Organizer would do herself equally well to provide us with statistical evidence indicating that, indeed, food and agricultural production under the Mahama regime far outstripped the “Feed Ghana” Akufo-Addo policy initiative. She knows her work is cut out for her, as New Yorkers are wont to say. She also knows that there is absolutely no way for her to, literally, pull wool over the eyes of the Ghanaian electorate. Indeed, if I were Dr. Bissiw, I would rather be wisely and quietly thinking of jumping ship to sail with the suave and winsome Akufo-Addo 2020 Presidential Election Frigate.

*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