Kumasi Mayor Is Asleep At The Wheel

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

I have not paid much attention to the recent reports about the rash of market fires around the country because as long as I can remember, never a year goes by without the occurrence of any such "commercial conflagrations" making news headlines or hitting the newsstands. In the wake of the Akufo-Addo/New Patriotic Party's Election 2012 presidential petition, some major players of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC), including President John Dramani Mahama and NDC's Chairman Kwabena Adjei, decided to make gratuitous political hay out of what may well be the result of faulty electrification system, as well as environmentally unsound methods of shelf-stocking and storage protocol.

Anyway, two aspects of the way in which the market fires have been approached, largely by NDC hacks and politicians, fascinate me here. The first of these concerns what may be aptly termed as the "verbal" and/or media overdrive of NDC partisans; these are largely paranoid hirelings who have capitalized on the market fires to simply volley inexcusable obscenities at their most formidable political opponents, in obvious hopes of whipping up gratuitous public sentiments against the Akufo-Addo petition.

One such media hack or hireling, he could really be both, published a characteristically desultory tirade captioned "Fire On The Mountain, Fire Down Below." Those who vividly remember that old grade school and high school "Samammo" or cheerleading ditty, could not take the contents of the afore-referenced article any more seriously than we could take the legitimacy of the seasonably besieged Mahama presidency.

The very first sentence of the quite notorious NDC propagandist's sorry-assed article was enough to turn me off. Dear reader, what does it mean for a writer who pontifically claims to be an award-winning assistant professor of English to write a sentence such as: "This is the most sporadic instance of fire outbreaks" when, really, what the obnoxiously boastful writer ought to have written is as follows: "This is the most widespread instance of fire outbreaks"?

To be frank with my dear reader, I stopped reading this rambunctious writer's articles the very moment I realized that, like most of my English remediation students, his articles were actually taking a deleterious toll on my grammar and vocabulary deployment. In the same article in reference, the writer/critic presumed rather haughtily to impugn the integrity of Ghanaian parliamentarians vis-a-vis the market flares as follows: "Even in performing their routine assignments, they [i.e. the MPs] leave room for much to be desired."

I mean, is this the same guy who loudly claims to have obtained his doctorate in linguistics and pedagogy or English education? Obviously, what this Long Island University, Brooklyn Campus, braggadocio/braggart meant in standard grammatical English is as follows: "Even the routine performance of their assignments [actually, 'duties'] leaves much to be desired.

Then, also, in a separate article stridently lambasting Mr. Samuel Okudzeto for aptly and poignantly reproving President Mahama for publicly commenting on a major case still being deliberated upon by Ghana's august Supreme Court, the writer, a well-known fanatical Ewe nationalist, had two varied spellings for the last name (or surname) of the distinguished former president of the Ghana Bar Association (GBA), as follows: "Okudzeto" and "Okudjeto."

The foregoing, coming from one who claims to have practised journalism in Ghana is rather strange. But that these two nominal variations occurred in two different halves of the same article, clearly points to the fact of at least two people having been writing some of these articles to which only one person has routinely been appending his name and academic credentials. Now, talk about intellectual and professional dishonesty!

Anyway, reports indicating that the Mayor of Kumasi, Mr. Kwadwo Bonsu, has yet to read the report on the widely covered fire that gutted the Kumasi Central Market in December of last year, six months after the fact, and in the wake of another equally destructive market fire at the same location, is more than simply disturbing.

What is more, Mr. Kwadwo Bonsu's rather lame excuse, or alibi, that he has not read the report because "there are many other reports needing his attention" is rather unfortunate. Indeed, it is rather unfortunate precisely because Mr. Bonsu also curiously appears to be stunningly devoid of any critical sense of administrative prioritization. In other words, even if he had been saddled with work overload, the mayor could still have assigned any of his legion assistants to digest the contents of the aforementioned report and presented Mr. Bonsu with an executive summary of the same, in order to enable him to expeditiously and constructively implement new safety measures.

Then also, the Kumasi mayor's decision to make funding available to victims of the market fires, for the construction of temporary structures in the same locations where fire gutted their businesses, without having read and fully studied the contents of the latest report on this evidently chronic epidemic, is rather foolhardy, to say the least.

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

Department of English

Nassau Community College of SUNY

Garden City, New York

June 22, 2013

E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

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