NPP did not campaign on commemorating the death of President Mills

The news article under discussion is captioned “Government Not Supporting 5th Anniversary of Atta-Mills’ Death – Koku Anyidoho” Citifmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 7/24/17).

In it, the Deputy General-Secretary of the country’s main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) is reported to be bitterly complaining to a media operative that he has no knowledge of the Akufo-Addo Administration contributing materially towards the 5th anniversary commemoration of the death of President John Evans Atta-Mills, the three-time Presidential Candidate of the National Democratic Congress.

Well, as it panned out, the controversial and pathologically uncouth Mr. Koku Anyidoho, the Atta-Mills Communications Director, was mischievously economizing with the truth, in mainstream American parlance, when he characteristically sought to discredit President Addo DankwaAkufo-Addo by implying that the former main political opponent of the country’s first president to die in office, somehow, did not give a hoot about the life and times of the man whose funeral he had attended at the State House, as I vividly recall.

But what is significant to remind Mr. Anyidoho of, here, is the fact that Nana Akufo-Addo had not campaigned for election on a platform of organizing the 5th anniversary commemoration of the man who never ceased reminding him, whenever Nana Akufo-Addo made any public statement that was deemed to be critical of his old Legon soccer teammate, that there was only one President in the Republic of Ghana, and that that President was none other than the former tax-law professor of the University of Ghana’s Faculty of Law.

Indeed, those who paid sedulous attention to the highlights of the Atta-Mills commemoration must have seen and/or heard Mr. Yaw Osafo-Maafo, the Akufo-Addo Senior Minister, present a lecture tribute in which he movingly recalled his intimate friendship with the late President, and how the two very good friends had, respectively, taught one another Mathematics and Latin, of which the late Prof. Atta-Mills was known to have a remarkable flair for.

Now, I don’t know what “fond memories” Mr. Anyidoho and his faux-socialist comrades had to share with each other, because what I remember most is then-President Mills’ staunchly and publicly defending Mr. Alfred AgbesiWoyome, the infamous Mega-Thief, for his supposedly inalienable right to literally steal GH? 51.2 million from the Ghanaian taxpayer for absolutely no work done in return for the same.

Mr. Martin Amidu, the then Atta-Mills Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, would be summarily fired from his post by his boss and former presidential candidacy partner. Mr. Amidu had, of course, once served abortively as the running-mate of the then-Candidate Mills on the latter’s first-time outing or shot at the presidency.

Mr. Amidu had been fired primarily because he had adamantly refused to side with his boss on Mr. Woyome’s right to keep his loot. This is the man that Mr. Anyidoho would have Ghanaians believe “had been a mainstay of Ghanaian politics” in the period between 1997 and 2001, when Prof. Mills served as arch-lieutenant or Vice-President to Chairman Jerry John Rawlings, the Founding-Father of the National Democratic Congress and, before the latter, the so-called Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC).

Well, here again, what I vividly remember is Prof. Mills’ deathly silence at the Osu Castle, while Chairman Rawlings and his wife, Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings, unremittingly tortured and gave the infamous Identification Haircut to ordinary Ghanaian citizens who came into the social orbit of the Rawlingses, but were unfortunate enough to get on their wrong side.

The ID Haircuts involved the clean and bloody shaving of the heads of the victims of the sadistic indulgences of the Rawlingses. In the most memorable, if also infamous, of such atrocities, Mr. Selassie Gyantu, a young beau of the Rawlingses’ eldest daughter, Ms. Zenator Rawlings, now the NDC-MP for Central-Accra’s Klottey-Korle Constituency, was given an Identification Haircut for committing the capital crime of jilting the now Dr. Zenator Rawlings.

Ultimately, though, and I have repeated this more times than I can remember, Mr. Anyidohohas to come clean vis-à-vis the murky circumstances surrounding the death of then-President Atta-Mills at The Castle on July 24, 2012.