President Mills is More Committed to Juliet Cotton

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

Mr. Stanley Dogbe does a lot of disservice to the people of the Volta Region, when the presidential aide insolently accuses Togbega Gabusu, Paramount Chief of the Hohoe Traditional Area, of “doing NPP politics” (See “Volta Varsity: Togbega Gabusu Is Doing NPP Politics – Stan Dogbe” MyJoyOnline.com 8/8/11). Maybe the Mills lapdog ought to explain precisely what is “NPP Politics,” and also what makes the latter any intrinsically worse than NDC politics.

The fact of the matter is that in the twenty years that the Rawlings posse has dominated the Ghanaian political landscape, there is a piddling little, by way of concrete projects on the ground, of which the people of the Volta Region could be reasonably proud. Needless to say, Mr. Dogbe lies through his teeth when he contemptuously claims that President Mills has set up a committee of “competent” operatives, headed by Prof. Sefa Dedeh, to make the so-called Volta University of Allied Health Sciences a reality.

The fact of the matter, here again, is that when it comes to his relationship with the Volta Region and its people, President John Evans Atta-Mills would rather hand over whatever loan sum he might have borrowed from the Chinese to any passably pretty woman fraudster who shows up on the scene with an Anglo-Western accent and claims to be a contractor with expertise in university campus construction. Does anybody need to cite Ms. Juliet Cotton, of the U.S. State of Georgia, a widely known welfare-check recipient, as an ample case in point?

Indeed, the latter episode may well underlie Mr. Richard Quashigah’s recent report of NDC nightmares in which some New Patriotic Party strategists were espied planting “spike girls” inside the luxury cars of these NDC thugs, in order to compromise President Mills’ Election 2012 campaign strategy.

To be certain, no leader worthy of his designation and integrity would look straight into the faces and eyes of some of his most ardent supporters and smirkingly lie to them about having a full-fledged university constructed for them in seven months! And then when he is literally caught with his pants down, sillily claim that it is the fault of his political opponents. Maybe this is what he means when Mr. Dogbe accuses Togbega Gabusu of playing “NPP Politics.”

On the question of the construction of an Eastern Corridor network of roadways, what Mr. Dogbe needs to ask himself is what 19 years of Mr. Rawlings brought to bear on such an unquestionably laudable project, rather than cynically snarling about what the Kufuor-led NPP administration did vis-à-vis the latter. At least the most democratic government in Fourth-Republican Ghana bequeathed the residents of the Volta Region and, indeed, the country at large with a comprehensive National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), where the pseudo-socialists of the so-called National Democratic Congress had viciously saddled them with the Darwinian Cash-and-Carry system of pay-your-own-way-or-perish.

It is also rather risible for Mr. Dogbe to presume that, somehow, the people of the Volta Region are woefully incapable of having Togbega Gabusu’s kind of creative imagination and critical thinking faculties. In other words, what is so NPP-ish about being intelligent and politically alert?

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is Director of The Sintim-Aboagye Center for Politics and Culture and author of 22 books, including “Dr. J. B. Danquah: Architect of Modern Ghana” (iUniverse.com, 2005). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net.

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