What Will Not Happen Under a Mahama and an Opoku-Agyemang Government

Going into the December 7, 2024, General Election, the leadership of the country’s main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) has two very big and almost unsurmountable problems. Which is why they have been desperately attempting to find nonexistent faults and problems with the Jean Adukwei Mensa-headed Independent Electoral Commission (IEC), and nearly every minor and frivolous issue, vis-à-vis the conduct and the integrity of both the staff of the Commission and – Guess What? – the very institutional establishment of the most transparent and efficiently run tenure in the history of the IEC, to-date, except that which really matters, to wit, the firmly established comparative governance performance records of both major political parties in the country, namely, the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the National Democratic Congress (NDC).

Now, the two major and nearly unsurmountable handicaps facing the leadership of the National Democratic Congress, going into the watershed 2024 General Election, in particular the 2024 Presidential Election, is the starkly inescapable fact that neither the twice-defeated, one-term former President and the Serial and the Dynastic Presidential Candidate of the National Democratic Congress, to wit, Candidate-General John “European Airbus Payola” Dramani Mahama, on the one hand, and Candidate Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang, also a once-defeated Vice-Presidential Candidate, offers any viable alternative to the lame-duck Akufo-Addo -led government of the New Patriotic Party.

For starters, both National Democratic Congress’ topmost Candidates have no enviable national development performance track record. As substantive President for four-and-half years, for example, the Bole-Bamboi native, from the Akufo-Addo-created Savannah Region, collapsed nearly every social-intervention project and/or program established by the John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor-led New Patriotic Party (2001-2009), including the historically unprecedented low-premium National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), which both Messrs. John Evans Atta “Woyome” Mills, late, and Dramani Mahama cynically claimed was a practical impossibility; and yet, these two ideologues of practical impossibilities had, reportedly, been among the very first prime beneficiaries to secure a National Health Insurance Card to readily access the aforesaid “practically impossible” National Health Insurance Scheme.

As well, as the Mahama-appointed Education Minister, Prof. Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang, who is widely known to have schooled all her three, or so, adult children and other relatives abroad, mainly in the United States of America and Canada, where Candidate Opoku-Agyemang had also obtained her advanced degrees, including a doctorate, all of them on scholarship grants, would summarily revoke the age-old Teacher-Trainee Allowances and callously insist that these poorly resourced near-future First Responders of our intellectual and cultural, as well as professional, brain trust needed to secure personal bank loans at prohibitive interest rates to tide themselves over, as it were.

Which is why when the Elmina native, from the Central Region, declares pontifically and insufferably presumptuously that: “The next election is not only about bringing the NDC back to power,” but that it is also “about the imperative and the indispensable need to return the NDC to Jubilee House,” so that the very people who greedily and thievishly bankrupted the country’s economy could definitively resolve “our currently dire economic circumstances,” one can only wonder about the whereabouts of Candidate Opoku-Agyemang between 2012 and 2016. Who has so soon and scandalously forgotten the Haruna Iddrisu-midwifed $72 million mega-heist at the Social Security and National Insurance Trust (SSNIT)?

Maybe somebody more mnemonically acute and civically responsible and patriotic adult-Ghanaian citizen ought to remind the first female Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cape Coast, that it was smack under her watch and tenure as Ghana’s Minister of Education, in 2015, when more than a dozen teacher trainees and academic administration trainees were fatally and scandalously felled by the common cholera epidemic, at the very same tertiary institutional establishment of which she had once served as the first female chief administrator. That the 2015 cholera epidemic was one of the most localized outbreaks of its kind for generations, ought to make Ghanaian citizens and voters wonder what sort of legacy Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang had left behind at her old alma mater and Ghana’s flagship tertiary academy for educators, where she and her ex-husband, or then boyfriend, had been undergraduates in the late 1970s.

You see, going by the warped logic of Candidate Opoku-Agyemang and the decidedly unenviable performance track record of the National Democratic Congress, returning the morally depraved and clinically irredeemable Mahama and the Johnson “The Mosquito” Asiedu-Nketia Posse to Jubilee House could only mean one thing and one thing only, namely, the precipitous downward spiral and the practically irreversible decline of Ghana’s economy. In view of the preceding unimpeachably scandalous performance track record of the previous Mills-Mahama and the Mahama/Amissah-Arthur tandem regimes, when Candidate Opoku-Agyemang morbidly and disingenuously declares that:

“When the time of reckoning arrives, Your Excellency John Mahama, I will not, in the advancement of [my own] self-serving ambition, declare to the whole world that I was only the driver’s mate,” Dear Reader, you can bet your proverbial “Bottom-Dollar” that, that is precisely what Naana Opoku-Agyemang is highly likely to do, just as Candidate Mahama told a teeming crowd of party supporters and sympathizers in Tamale, the Northern Regional Capital, in the runup to the 2012 Presidential Election, that a pathologically ethnic chauvinist then recently deceased President Atta-Mills and his Akan kinsmen and women of the then main opposition New Patriotic Party had strategically and perpetually colluded and connived to make their northern-descended associates “Presidential Spare-Tires.” So, far, there is no forensically credible evidence indicating that Candidate Opoku-Agyemang is any less prone to political opportunism and plain cant and chicanery than the rest of the hoodlum pack of the National Democratic Congress’ apparatchiks.

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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]