By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
The sacking of Ms. Victoria Hammah, as deputy communications minister, was only a matter of time. In the recent past, Ms. Hammah had been vigorously defended by some leading members and diaspora-based sympathizers of the Trokosi Wing of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC), almost as if to adamantly insist that the most delectable behavioral hallmarks of an NDC cabinet appointee were gross emotional immaturity, abject disrespect for law and order, and an inordinate penchant for grand larceny.
One Trokosi Nationalist by the name of Mr. Daniel Pryce, if memory serves us accurately, had the chutzpah to characterize Ms. Hammah's flagrantly apparent emotional lack of poise as purely human and even normal. I have no doubt, whatsoever, that Mr. Pryce, if he has not already done so, will shortly, once again, come out with another shamelessly poignant dissertation in defense of Ms. Victoria Hammah.
But that the dismissed deputy communications minister typically represented the cast of reprobate characters who pass for the cream of Fourth Republican Ghanaian leadership, these days, cannot be gainsaid. And, of course, the biggest reprobate among the ranks of such scandalous leadership is, you guessed right, President John Dramani Mahama himself! Nonetheless, it is the obnoxiously self-righteous Mr. Jeremiah John Rawlings, the founding-patriarch of the so-called National Democratic Congress, who ought to bear the brunt of the blame for almost singularly creating this unprecedented breed of thievishly shameless Ghanaian politicians.
To be certain, I am far, far less interested in that portion of the secretly recorded audiotape in which Ms. Hammah is allegedly heard on the phone telling a female interlocutor that she would not quit politics until she had made at least $1million. I mean, how many Ghanaian politicians, including the very man who both hired and fired Ms. Hammah, can confidently claim that they went into politics with the sole aim and/or purpose of distributing their own personally acquired wealth, and other capital resources, among the largely capital-poor people who voted them into office?
For my part, though, I wish that President Mahama were bold and courageous enough to publicly and personally inform the Ghanaian electorate precisely why he waited this long to afford Ms. Victoria Hammah the boot, as it were. And also inform us about what heinous crime(s) it was that Ms. Hammah committed, and of which President Mahama himself stands biblically innocent. I bet my bottom dollar, my dear reader, that Mr. Mahama would dare not stick out his head for the guillotine on this score. Not even in dire and/or staunch defense of the fidelity or chastity of Mrs. Lordina Mahama!
What we are more interested in - and legitimately so - regards whether, indeed, as widely alleged, a prominent Mahama cabinet appointee was actually afforded the legally flagrant, if not outright criminal, opportunity to confer with the entire membership of the Atuguba panel of Supreme Court jurists that heard the Election 2012 Prresidential Petition, shortly before these members of the highest court of the land appeared before members of the Ghanaian public and the global community, via television cameras, to deliver their verdict.
If, indeed, the preceding event did occur, then a capital crime of seditious tenor, and of heinous proportions, has been committed which needs to be promptly and unreservedly punished! My people, war has come upon the land; who shall act the wise statesman or -woman here?
_________________________________________________ *Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D. Department of English Nassau Community College of SUNY Garden City, New York Nov. 11, 2013 E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net ###
