Bawumia Must Prepare for Clean Break with Akufo-Addo on Running-Mate Palaver

It ought to be limpidly clear to Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia, the 2024 Presidential Candidate of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP), and the widely presumed Next President of our beloved Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana, that the members of the Kyebi Mafia, so-called, with the possible exception of a couple of well-meaning members in no particularly good standing, are not apt to forgive the Walewale native, from the Akufo-Addo-created North-East Region, anytime soon and, primarily, for boldly and courageously standing his grounds and demanding the rather belated resignation or prompt removal of “loan-addicted” Cousin Kenneth Ofori-Atta, the Akufo-Addo-appointed Finance Minister, who ought to have been jackbooted the very moment that then Independent Special Prosecutor Martin ABK Amidu royally exposed the Columbia- and Yale universities-educated Databank co-owner or co-proprietor for being the pathologically self-serving and unconscionable Mega-Thief that he had scandalously demonstrated himself to be, in the globally infamous Agyapa Mineral Heritage Racket, immediately after the 2020 General Election, whose skin-of-tooth victory almost slipped through the hands and the fingers of the key operatives of the New Patriotic Party.

Which is why Yours Truly is fully convinced beyond any reasonable iota of doubt that party stalwart Atik Mohammed is grossly mistaken to so cavalierly suggest that Ken Ofori-Atta ought to have been retained in the Akufo-Addo cabinet, until the end of the 8-year tenure of the presently lame-duck President Akufo-Addo, so as to enable the man whose own cousin Gabriel “Gabby” Asare Otchere-Darko, of Asaase Radio infamy, had the temerity to tell the nation had since long bought and paid for his Finance Minister’s portfolio by heavily investing in the presidential ambitions of the twice-defeated Candidate Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, to “clean up his own frigging mess,” a trend of logical reasoning which this author finds to be at once rather weird and comical (See “You were only addicted to loans; you didn't help Ghana in any way — Atik Mohammed to Ken Ofori-Atta” Modernghana.com 6/26/24).

Now, isn’t it downright incongruous for anybody to expect a man whose widely and publicly described gross managerial incompetence had allegedly created the bulk of the Stygian mess in which our beloved nation presently finds itself, to be expected to have stayed at post or smack on the job to clean up such horrid mess? Were Mr. Ofori-Atta, indeed, as managerially incompetent as Mr. Mohammed recently claimed in a radio interview, why would the same critic now be suggesting that the man who had been fired by the President – actually, even as the critic himself laments, had been “mis-promoted” to the much higher portfolio of Presidential Advisor on International Finance – be allowed to stay put so that he could clean up the very stinky mess that he had created? I mean, were Ken Ofori-Atta that remarkably competent in the obviously confused imagination of Mr. Mohammed, would the Akyem Mafia Boy have created such an “Afadjato” mess, to begin with? This is akin to the Serial and the Dynastic Presidential Candidate of the country’s main opposition National Democratic Congress, namely, the twice-defeated former one-term President John “European Airbus SE Payola” Dramani Mahama, kicking and screaming his lungs out to be allowed back into Jubilee House so “I could correct my past mistakes.”

But, of course, the preceding is not really the crux of the present column, which squarely hinges on the need for Vice-President Bawumia to go even further by boldly and poignantly negotiating what might be aptly and strategically termed as “a clean break” with the now-lame-duck President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, in much the same way and manner that a savvily self-protective then-Candidate Akufo-Addo is widely alleged to have flatly and obdurately ignored dastardly and strategically artless and downright mischievous attempts by some factional party stalwarts to impose a politically unprepossessing Presidential Running-Mate on Candidate Akufo-Addo in the runup to the 2008 Presidential Election. Trust me, such a drastic and seismic paradigmatic shift is apt to boost the standing and the reputation of the Simon Fraser, Canada, doctoral-degree holder in economics before the overwhelming majority of the Ghanaian electorate. It will also demonstrate beyond any reasonable doubt that Candidate Bawumia is unarguably his own man.

It is also beyond contest or debate that Dr. Bawumia has earned his keep, as it were, and therefore absolutely ought not in any way feel bound or beholden to any party heavyweight, including the President. To be certain, had he not already been as academically fetching and professionally successful as he already was at the time that Nana Akufo-Addo adamantly settled on him as his most vintage choice of a Running-Mate, the Oxbridge-educated re-denominator of the National Democratic Congress “Junkified” Cedi and the nonexistent Pesewa would not have been so comfortably and adamantly settled upon as the Running-Mate of the former Attorney-General and Minister of Justice in the government of President John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor.

You see, in so confidently and comfortably settling on the former Deputy-Governor of the Bank of Ghana, Nana Akufo-Addo was actually doing himself a favor, by significantly boosting his own chances of gaining a foothold in Jubilee House. Which was why the relatively far less politically attractive Candidate Akufo-Addo kept adamantly retaining his equally principled and politically determined, civically minded and national-development oriented Dr. Bawumia, against an avalanche of largely ideologically and politically stereotypical criticisms.

Now, there is a maxim which says that: “One good turn deserves another” and, even more aptly, “What is good for the goose is equally good for the gander.” I also have a brief news story captioned “Ghana Reaches $1.6bn Debt Restructuring Deal with Independent Power Producers” (Business News Europe/Intellinews.com 6/25/24), in which we are reliably informed by Ghana’s Finance Minister, Dr. Mohammed Amin Adam, that a debt-restructuring forum recently held in London, the British capital, with independent power producers and suppliers to Ghana, has reached an agreement which will ensure an uninterrupted energy supply in the country.

As well, we also know that several dubious opinion polls recently released to the media by the so-called Akyem and the Asante Mafia, the most notorious of which came from the National Investigations Bureau (NIB), a statutorily authorized nonpartisan national security establishment, seeking to scandalously coronate Dr. Matthew Opoku-Prempeh as the Running-Mate of Candidate Mahamudu Bawumia, almost exclusively solicited the opinions of New Patriotic Party stalwarts and executives, just under 6,000 of them, which comes up to far less than one-percent of one-percent of even officially registered voting members the New Patriotic Party, much less the entirety of our National Biometric Voters’ Register (NBVR).

These people never learn any valuable lessons from their collective experiences. You see, we have gone down this primrose path of near-political suicide before in Adansi-Fomena, as we all must vividly recall, but for the pyrrhic saving grace of Mr. Kennedy “Akom-Prigozhin” Ohene Agyapong, Ghana’s 8^th Parliament would have effectively descended into politically suicidal chaos and virtual stasis. I have also often said that cheap and fiery pontifical talk about studious democratic praxis and all, on the whole, the leadership of the ruling New Patriotic Party, by and large, is not significantly different from the relatively far more hawkish albeit autocratically savvier and more disciplined leadership of the country’s main opposition National Democratic Congress.

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