We prefer a principled serial loser to a pathologically corrupt payola addict

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

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

October 6, 2016

E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

It is rather pathetic to hear the leadership of a morbidly desperate National Democratic Congress (NDC) crawl over each other in a welter of contradictory statements all of which are maliciously aimed at vilifying and assassinating the character of their most formidable political opponent, namely, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo. Just the other day, one of the party’s cynical hirelings wrote a two-part pabulum which he passed off as a critical analysis of the questionable character of the three-time Presidential Candidate of the country’s main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP).

As usual, the rabidly anti-Akufo-Addo Trokosi nationalist writer vacuously captioned his article “Akufo-Addo Is a Nobody.” And then just a couple of days later, that same cassava-grating SOB wrote another couple of articles quixotically celebrating the fact that the same supposedly “nobody” Akufo-Addo appears to have literally broken all the conventional rules of academia and the legal profession to get himself admitted to the bar in Ghana. Well, my simple back-handed riposte to the Trokosi “skin-pain” maniac is tersely as follows: Nana Akufo-Addo is already a distinguished trial lawyer whose accomplishments are all too indelible for any ragamuffin hate-monger to casually write off in his delirious literary guff. We intend to take up a few aspects of the scatological rants of this Trokosi nationalist and expose them for the striking reflection of the acute clinical dementia that they mirror in due course.

For now, we have decided to turn our attention to a statement that Mr. Fiifi Kwetey, the Mahama lap dog and Minister of Transport, was widely reported to have made a few days ago, to the effect that the NPP-bestowed epithet of “Incompetent Mahama” or “Incompetent President John Dramani Mahama” is a tag that ought to be more suitably prefixed to the name of Nana Akufo-Addo, because the New Patriotic Party leader has lost two consecutive presidential elections. We must quickly point out that scarcely a month ago, the South Korean Ambassador had prime occasion to call the Transportation Minister a thoroughgoing incompetent cabinet appointee who had absolutely no sense of time and professional diligence and decency.

The news report also had the South Korean Ambassador inviting some crackerjack civil engineers from Seoul, the South Korean capital, to assist the Mahama government devise a strategic means of drastically reducing traffic congestion in the nation’s capital. The Korean Ambassador would wait for close to an hour before any senior official of Mr. Kwetey’s ministry arrived. The minister himself was predictably AWOL. Meanwhile, we are told that in addition to dispatching a platoon of civil engineers into the country, the South Korean government had provided a generous grant of $1 million to facilitate the drawing up of a strategic plan for the easing up of traffic congestion in the Accra-Tema Metropolitan Area ten years from now.

Now, tell me, my dear reader, is this poor excuse of a ministerial appointee one that comfortably affords Mr. Kwetey the moral and professional credibility to presume to impugn the leadership competence of Nana Akufo-Addo? I have said this before and hereby repeat the same: that if Mr. Kwetey and his hoodlum-pack of rascally associates of the Mahama cabinet had paid sedulous attention to the very first statement that the NDC’s General-Secretary made about the 2012 presidential election, Mr. Kwetey would have promptly sobered up and saved himself from this sort of public contretemps. The fact of the matter, according to Mr. Johnson Asiedu-Nketia (aka General Mosquito), is that the 2012 presidential election was criminally stolen by Mahama appointees and hangers-on, including the suavely anti-Akufo-Addo extant Electoral Commissioner and college roommate, Dr. Kwadwo Afari Gyan.

The latter would shortly be awarded Ghana’s highest civilian honor. According to General Mosquito, it was the abject lack of vigilance on the part of New Patriotic Party polling agents and volunteers that guaranteed the presidency of an otherwise highly unlikely President John Dramani Mahama. And so, obviously, to the extent that Nana Akufo-Addo could not successfully count on the loyalty of his party’s operatives at the various polling stations around the country, Mr. Kwetey may be aptly conceded a remarkable modicum of credibility in his impugnation of Nana Akufo-Addo’s leadership competence. Beneath the surface of things, however, the stark reality bespeaks of the veritable criminal culpability of the NDC hoodlum pack’s connivance, rather than sheer electoral or political incompetence on the part of Akufo-Addo.

But even more telling of NDC’s electoral shenanigans is the fact that some Supreme Court judges on the infamous Atuguba-presided panel that adjudicated the presidential petition are known by a study commissioned by the U.S.-based Ford Foundation, or some such traditional think-tank sponsor, to have changed their verdicts at least twice or thrice. But, of course, we all know that when Mr. Mahama is called out on his widely perceived leadership incompetence, this has everything to do with his inescapable inability to healthily grow the Ghanaian economy. Which largely explains why the NDC apparatchiks have been screaming their lungs out to have Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, the three-time Akufo-Addo running-mate, return to his purported ideological roots, to wit, the Rawlings-minted National Democratic Congress.

And all this, after quixotically pretending that Dr. Bawumia could not differentiate between the terms “deficit” and “credit,” when it comes to gauging the real state of the country’s economic pulse and health.

*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs