You’d Be Dead before You Could Deny Being a Driver’s Mate, Naana!

The clever but scarcely savvy strategy has been for the leaders of the Cash-and-Carry, blood-sucking institutional establishment of the country’s main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) to disingenuously pretend that, somehow, it is Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia who has been desperately struggling to expediently and opportunistically dissociate himself from both the historic and administratively unsurpassed social-intervention oriented national development achievements of a lame-duck President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, and the current scarcely nonesuch economic difficulties that the country is experiencing.

The stark, readily verifiable and unimpeachable truth and factual reality of the matter, though, is that it was an unconscionable and an ungrateful Candidate John “European Airbus Payola” Dramani Mahama who first sought to despicably thumb his nose at the recently deceased President John Evans Atta-Mills, when the Serial and the Dynastic Presidential Candidate of the National Democratic Congress stood in the middle of a Tamale sports arena insultingly told a teaming crowd of party supporters and sympathizers that he had been used and royally abused by being made a “Driver’s Mate” by a “Kabonga,” that is, the man who had actually elevated the former Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings-appointed Communications Minister to the highest level of elective public office at the very instant that, by default, an Interim-President Mahama could, at best, have only imagined himself to be where circumstances had bizarrely both conspired and collaborated to place him.

Ghanaian voters also need to seriously bear in mind the curious fact that Candidate Mahama is also the very first President and/or Vice-President in the entire postcolonial history of our beloved Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana to have publicly and euphorically celebrated on television and on multimedia forums and platforms the tragic and the catastrophic passing of his immediate boss and prime benefactor as a godsend and an auspicious act of an “Inscrutable Divine Providence” who, in His “All-Transcending Wisdom,” had deemed it to be most fitting and opportune to. Implicitly, liquidate his most implacable and inveterate enemy in order to prophetically select and crown the Bole-Bamboi native, from the Akufo-Addo-created Savannah Region, as the First Postcolonial-Born Ghanaian Leader.

Now, all conscientious and progressive-minded Ghanaian citizens and voters must reckon the equally curious and scandalous fact that this is the caliber of man and the cutthroat politician that Prof. Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang has decided to hitch a bumpy ride with to jubilee House, and it eerily begins to appear that this odd-couple may be privy to something sinister that the rest of us, bona fide Ghanaian citizens and voters, have yet to know or catch onto. Now, we have said this innumerable times before and hereby reiterate the same, once again, that a Vice-President who cannot forensically credibly explain the clearly murky circumstances surrounding the death of his immediate boss and prime benefactor, and the very first Fourth Republican Ghanaian Leader to “Mysteriously” vanish into the blue, as it were, can never, once again, be entrusted with the interests and the national security of our beloved Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana.

Such a shady politician of unarguably dubious character is, at best, a serious national security risk of the most heinous order. Candidate Mahama has proven himself to be criminally unaccountable to the Ghanaian people, exactly the diametrically opposite of what all responsible and law-abiding Ghanaian citizens require of their leader, who needs to be worthy of the emulation of our children and grandchildren, the near-future leaders and the socioeconomic backbone of our Dear and Beloved Ghana. if, indeed, the Mahama 2024 Presidential-Election Running-Mate, namely, Prof. Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang, is as surefire as hell convinced that the occasion will never arrive or arise for her to “ungratefully” or “expediently” and traitorously claim to have been royally used and abused as a “Driver’s Mate” by Yagbonwura Okogufuo Kwame Gonja, then very likely the first woman to have ever been named as Vice-Chancellor of any major tertiary academy in Ghana has yet to seriously reckon the fact that she could very well be “vanished” by her immediate boss well before she could open her mouth to say “Mewuradze, Mawuoo!” or “I am, indeed, President Mahama’s Senior Copilot.”

It is also quite clear that Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang has yet to compare notes with Mrs. Matilda Amissah-Arthur, widow of the late former Vice-President Paa Kwesi Bekoe Amissah-Arthur. If she had or she ever did, Naana Opoku-Agyemang would also have wisely and critically read something more spiritually sobering and intellectually enlightening into the thinly veiled albeit very serious reminder that was recently generously afforded her by Mr. Kwesi Ahwoi, the youngest of the three globally infamous Ahwoi Brothers. Running-Mate Naana Opoku-Agyemang also really did not need to promise Ghanaians that she intended to fully share the responsibility of running the country with Kwame Gonja, in the highly unlikely event of the duo’s being returned to Jubilee House by Ghanaian voters, come December 7, 2024, or thereabouts, because she already defamed and degraded herself irreparably and irredeemably the last time around.

That above-referenced period was when the then-President Mahama appointed her as Ghana’s Minister of Education. She had better start composing at least the new tune that she very likely would be singing to the Teacher Trainees, whose meager professional-training allowances she and her boss so rudely and summarily revoked, even as many of her own ministerial colleagues and cabinet associates took home fat sums of double salaries, with the criminal complicity of Candidate-General John “Gnassingbe” (Ford Expedition Payola) Dramani Mahama. Could have fooled me, “Aketesia Naana,” or is it “Abrewa Bɔne Naana”?

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
April 26, 2024
E-mail: [email protected]