They have been rolling down the blood-splattered canvas with the punches and could not get back on their feet on the referees last count; but they are still kicking and screaming to be allowed to get back into the game. Obviously, these punch-drunk political clowns are too addle-brained to realize that the joke is on them. This is pretty much the image that flashes across my mind, anytime that any of these shameless and charlatanic parliamentary operatives of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) quixotically presume that they could, somehow, deliver a knockout punch against their much better toned and tuned-up opponents of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP).
In the latest of such lurid acts of clinical buffoonery, we have the National Democratic Congress’ Member of Parliament for Juaboso, in the Western Region, demanding that President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo’s Coronavirus negative test must be confirmed by research scientists at the Legon-based Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research (NIMR), before the cynical likes of his ilk invests any credibility in the same (See “Make Akufo-Addo’s Coronavirus Test Report Public – Mintah Akandoh” Peacefmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 4/3/20). I guess the Juaboso street urchin turned MP is having a hard time making himself relevant or any meaningful contribution to the ongoing critical discourse on the search for a quick and definitive solution to the Chinese-originated Coronavirus Pandemic.
This 39-year-old boy – trust me, Dear Reader, Mr. Kwabena Mintah Akandoh behaves in a far more infantile manner than both of my 12- and 14-year-old sons – belongs to a political party whose leaders have yet to be able to look Ghanaian citizens and voters straight in the eye and explain to us, as well as the global community at large, of course, precisely under what grisly set of circumstances the country’s first Fourth-Republican President to die in office met his proverbial Maker, that is, the same Divine Providence who the then-Vice-President John Dramani Mahama told the nation, at the time, had auspiciously and wisely butt-kicked then-President John Evans Atta-Mills off the lavishly caparisoned Kofi Antubam Chair so that he, Mr. John Dramani Mahama, could be euphorically celebrated as the first Ghanaian President to have been born post-1957.
In retrospect, it “inscrutably” appears that in defying the savvy and foresighted counsel of the Rawlingses not to pick a pathologically narcissistic megalomaniac, who was also insufferably treacherous and untrustworthy as his running-mate, the then-Candidate John Evans Atta-Mills was also, ironically, signing off on his own death warrant. But, of course, what is most annoying here is the very suggestion by Mr. Mintah Akandoh, who was barely four years old when yours truly departed the sunny skies of Ghana for the United States that, somehow, the professional credibility of the President’s own personal physician, Dr. Patrina Takyi-Ankrah, cannot be trusted. No such remark could be more insulting to the Ghanaian citizenry, and I hereby solemnly appeal to Speaker Aaron Michael Oquaye to personally drag “The Gentleman from Juaboso” onto the august floor of the House and have this despicable SOB render an unqualified apology to both Dr. Takyi-Ankrah and the full-membership of the House and, by extension, the good and honorable people of the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana.
And then, for good measure, it would be perfectly in order for Mr. Mintah Akandoh to be immediately suspended from Parliament without pay and be ordered to undergo counseling and be tutored on etiquette or good manners of the sort that has made Ghana the cultural beacon and lodestar or guiding light of Continental Africa. To be certain, several weeks of Community Service, as a well-deserved disciplinary measure, would not be the least bit totally out of place or order. I mean, since when did it become a statutory edict in fourth Republican and Sovereign Democratic Ghana that to be deemed to be credible, any official pronouncement on the state or condition of the health of the President of Ghana had to be either pronounced or certified by the administrators or operatives of any medical laboratory or research institute to be reckoned as such?
You see, Dear Reader, I partly departed the shores of Ghana approximately 35 years ago, because of the gross and coldly calculated misdeeds by stupid and psychologically unhinged politicians like Mr. Mintah Akandoh, who had hijacked Ghanaian democracy, in the spurious name of “Probity, Accountability, Transparency and Justice,” piggybacked on the out-of-control truck of “Revolution.” Now, 40 years on, we all eyewitnesses to the vintage fruits of the Woyome-oiled wheels of the Rawlings-Tsikata-Ahwoi Revolution.
*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs
By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department,
SUNY-Nassau Garden City, New York
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net