Does Gaslighting Martin Amidu See Crushing Defeat for NDC in Election 2024? – Part 9

Amidu’s snide attempt to blame foreign-funded Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) in the country for an Incumbent President John “SADA Gravy-Train Conducting” Dramani Mahama’s massive loss of the 2016 Presidential Election is characteristically absurd. It is also rather scandalously ironic that the self-proclaimed assassination target of former President Mahama had apparently not paid sedulous attention to media reports and radio interviews in the wake of the 2012 Presidential Election, whose results were hotly disputed before the Supreme Court of Ghana. Else, Martin Amidu would have heard Johnson “The Mosquito” Asiedu-Nketia, at the time the General-Secretary of the National Democratic Congress and, presently, the National Chairman of the NDC, sheepishly confess to the host of an Accra-based current affairs FM-radio program that Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan, Chairperson of the Electoral Commission, and his fellow Bono sub-citizen or clansman, he would have heard the former Rawlings-appointed Deputy Minister of Defense confess to the aforesaid FM-radio program host that the results of the 2012 Presidential Election may very well have flagrantly, if not downright criminally and treasonously, been cooked and delivered on a diamond-gilt platter in favor of the widely believed and anticipated loser, to wit, an Incumbent President Mahama.

The wiry-framed man who has been affectionately nicknamed “General Mosquito” would also go on to further confess that but for the abject lack of vigilance on the part of the woefully and significantly under-resourced Akufo-Addo polling agents, assigns and monitors, there absolutely would not have been even the proverbial Chinaman’s Chance for the former Rawlings’ Deputy Communications Minister, later substantive Communications Minister, to have carried the vote and, for that matter, the 2012 Presidential Election. A truth-economizing Martin Amidu also characteristically conveniently ignores to significantly underscore the readily accessible fact that four-and-half years of Dumsor, that is, the perennially erratic supply of power, had resulted in the effective collapse of nearly 2/3rds (Two-Thirds) of all businesses, both publicly and privately owned businesses, which had logically resulted in a historically unprecedented upsurge in the level and the rate of unemployment in the country.

Instead, this is what the strategically and characteristically disingenuous Martin Amidu has to say in his widely discredited 2024 Tamale-UDS-sponsored Harmattan School prolix of a supposedly comprehensive and authoritative synopsis of the political and the constitutional history of 32 years of Fourth-Republican Ghana: “Promises of a better and good governance without draconian taxes on the people and with an assurance of the judicious use of the nation’s resources for the wellbeing of [all] Ghanaians recruited [endeared or attracted?] even [diehard] members of the NDC, including myself into supporting then-Candidate Akufo-Addo[,] who easily beat the incumbent President at the 2016 elections to make a first in the history of the country of defeating an incumbent Presidential Candidate. Nana Akufo-Addo was so successful in convincing the electorate about his determination to fight corruption which was pervasive within the government that the electorate went along and voted [for] him to [become] President.”

Coincidentally, Akufo-Addo’s flat and adamant refusal to indict and rigorously prosecute his immediate predecessor’s double-salary drawing cabinet appointees, signaled the ominous beginning of the epic failure of his much-touted steely determination to fight official corruption at all levels. It also vindicates the assertion by the self-proclaimed Citizen Vigilante that Nana Akufo-Addo may very well be the most corruption-accommodating of all the five Fourth-Republican Presidents, except for the fact of his immediate successor’s having been unimpeachably “beatified” by the late President Rawlings as postcolonial Ghana’s most thoroughgoing corrupt leader.

Like the much-remarked stereotypical street-brawling Hausa man or woman, Martin Amidu disingenuously attempts to rope in the entirety of the Ghanaian electorate, in particular those who crossed party lines to vote Nana Akufo-Addo into Jubilee House, for having, in retrospect, scandalously overestimated the electioneering-campaign mendacity of the aforementioned leader vis-à-vis Nana Akufo-Addo’s much-vaunted “incorruptible” determination to fight rank corruption in Ghanaian society. For this inveterate critic of Nana Akufo-Addo and implacable enemy of multiparty democratic culture, this most painful miscalculation is Just a Good Lesson Well Learned:

“I have no regrets for writing these words of thanks and congratulations and the trust I placed in Nana Akufo-Addo’s presentation of [him-]self to the majority of the electorate as [one who was] going to make a difference as President in deepening democracy, the rule of law, constitutionalism and nipping in the bud the privileges of the political establishment and elite patronage, cronyism, lootism and above all unbridled corruption of the winning political party. If, with [in?] hindsight, I got it [all] wrong[,] it [simply] means [that] the electorate also got it wrong and there is [absolutely] nothing to [really] regret[,] except [to] learn from the rhymes of history.”

A much smarter Martin Amidu ought to have realized well beforehand that, at heart, or fundamentally speaking, the newly elected leadership of the Akufo-Addo-led government of the New Patriotic Party had not flown into the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana from outer space. They had, nearly each and every one of them, grown up and imbibed the same existential lessons and moral and cultural values as the morbidly and pathologically kleptocratic Mahama Posse that had just been “Tsunamistically” and “Gazafistically” dislodged from Jubilee House. It is also significant to note that for Martin Amidu, the wantonly gross administrative incompetence that characterized most of the decade, or so, years that the Rawlings-led extortionate and ethnocentric junta of the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) was the virtually unchallenged government and the law of the land, as it were, was almost exclusively the fault of such “foreign-funded” Civil Society Organizations as the Jean Adukwei Mensa-cofounded institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), perhaps the very first nongovernmental or privately operated think-tank of its kind in Fourth-Republican Ghana, and the Prof. Gyimah-Boadi-led or directed Center for Democratic Development of Ghana (CDD-Ghana) which, we are “knowingly informed,” had undergone its own gestation [tutelage?] under IEA before it was incorporated by the [Ghanaian husband or] spouse of the Political Officer of the United States’ Embassy in May 1998 as a not-for-profit NGO.”

Such cynical Martin Amidu characterization is of signal importance to highlight because the subtle and deliberately understated but, nevertheless, politically or diplomatically damning implication here is that, somehow, these neoliberal and multiparty-democracy oriented mostly Accra-based think-tanks and policy-monitoring establishments were being funded or financially supported by the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), with the sole and primary agenda or purpose of destabilizing the PNDC- cannibalized faux-socialist and de facto one-party state that was the Ghana that existed between December 31, 1981 and December, 1991, or thereabouts.

Now, the PNDC junta, despite its having gotten Ghana deeply and inextricably mired in the economic strait-jacket trap of the Washington, DC-based Bretton-Woods establishments of the IMF and The World Bank, in the political and the ideological playbook of Martin Amidu and most of the topmost leadership of the erstwhile PNDC and, presently, the country’s main opposition National Democratic Congress had, somehow, done absolutely nothing wrong or amiss for soliciting and/or sourcing funding from the same Western countries that were supposedly funding national-security undermining or destabilizing Civil-Society Think-Tanks like the IEA and the CDD, among a host composedof other unnamed CIA-backed think-tanks in the country.

The sardonic irony here is that the ideology and the economic policies of the Rawlings-founded and the Kojo Tsikata-operated Provisional National Defense Council and the latter’s immediate and direct progeny, namely, the National Defense Congress, brazenly and unabashedly hewed towards such Marxian socialist countries as Cuba, Libya, North Korea, Russia and China and some of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Now, isn’t it rather weird and psychologically stultifying that these vehicular-tire-made sandals and shoes-wearing P/NDC Apostles of the “Probity, Accountability, Transparency and Justice” mantra-chanting pseudo-revolutionaries had at the time of its violent military overthrow, had self-righteously accused the Hilla Limann-led and democratically elected People’s National Party (PNP) of selling Ghana out to the Imperial-Capitalist-Piranhas of the West as their unimpeachable justification for ousting the PNP which, by the way, was largely top-heavy composed of the so-called Old Guards from the long-ousted Kwame Nkrumah-led Convention People’s Party (CPP) – (1957-1966)?

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
February 22, 2024
E-mail: [email protected]