It Takes More than a Doctoral Dissertation to Manage a Corrupt Ghanaian Economy

I am presently absolutely in no celebratory mood to hold brief for the 2024 Presidential Candidate of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP), Vice-President Mahama “Issaka?” Bawuma – I wish the evidently star-crossed widely presumed Next President of Ghana could write back to tell us his middle name, that is, if he happens to have any – whom I fear literally threw caution to the wind, when he so overtly and scandalously sought the blessing and the patently inadvisable approval of a lame-duck President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, vis-à-vis the most suitable selection of his Presidential Running-Mate, when the most fetching choice was more than obviously right before him.

Still, to Mr. Kwesi Pratt’s rather quaint observation that the then-Candidate Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo had, somehow, made an egregious error in judgment by not reading the doctoral dissertation of the Simon Fraser University, Canada, alumnus Alhaji Mahamudu Bawumia before deciding on the then Deputy-Governor of the Bank of Ghana as his 2008 Presidential Running-Mate and then for three more electoral seasons thereafter, we also ask the even more relevant question of whether the late President Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings, Founding-Father of Ghana’s present main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), had also read the doctoral dissertation of the late Prof. Kwesi Botchwey which, by the way, had been written and defended in the discipline of law, before the northern Ghana-born Anlo-Ewe homeboy was named Ghana’s Finance and Economic-Planning Minister for nearly 15 years? (See “ ‘I Couldn’t Doubt Why We Are in this Mess’ after Reading Bawumia’s Doctorate Thesis – Kwesi Pratt” Ghanaweb.com 6/26/24).

Now, I am not holding any brief for the widely presumed Next President of our beloved Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana just yet, because I am still disconsolately grieving the Vice-President’s most outrageous loss of a prime opportunity to have selected the best and the most suitable man for the job, namely, Dr. Yaw Osei-Adutwum. I still expect the former Deputy-Governor of the Bank of Ghana to smoothly and effectively sail successfully through the treacherous shoals of the 2024 Presidential Election, because Dr. Bawumia is easily and unarguably the far better of the two major candidates vying for occupancy of the Agyekum-Kufuor-constructed Jubilee House.

But even well before we delve deeply into matters of serious concern any further, we also need to promptly emphasize the fact that for the past seven years, even as the Walewale native, from the Akufo-Addo-created North-East Region, categorically noted in his official 2024 electioneering-campaign inaugural address at the University of Professional Studies in Accra (UPSA) early in the year, that policymaking and execution in the Akufo-Addo Jubilee House had been effectively controlled and determined by Mr. Kenneth Kuntunkununku Ofori-Atta, the Finance Minister and cousin of President Akufo-Addo, and that until very recently, Vice-President Bawumia’s official title as Head of the Economic Management Team (EMT) of the government notwithstanding, it was the Columbia and the Yale universities-educated Mr. Ofori who, by the way, had no doctoral dissertation under his belt, as it were, who effectively controlled and managed official government policy.

Now, the Editor-Publisher of the so-called Insight newspaper cannot pretend not to be well aware of this long-known fact. Has Mr. Pratt also bothered himself to read the Master’s-Degree Thesis written and defended by Mr. Ofori-Atta at Ivy-festooned Yale University? And now, pertaining to the Doctoral Dissertation of Dr. Bawumia, had Mr. Pratt really understood what he anahad read of the latter? You see, merely claiming to have read Dr. Bawumia’s dissertation is the easiest part of the equation, as it were. The real deal here is the fact of whether the 70-plus-year-old Mr. Pratt, a nondegree graduate of the old Ghana Institute of Journalism (GIJ), had actually understood what he publicly claims to have read from the pages and the chapters of Dr. Bawumia’s dissertation.

And if the Agona-Nsabaa native, from the Central Region, has really read Dr. Bawumia’s dissertation, why did he not discuss any relevant chapters or parts of the aforesaid dissertation the basis upon which he stakes his dubious claim of the Vice-President’s not having been adequately prepared, both academically and professionally, to manage a perennially and grossly mismanaged National Democratic Congress-corrupted Ghanaian economy. You see, I have personally followed some of the “heroic” exploits of the-now Vice-President Bawumia while the New Patriotic Party was in political opposition, such as going to Mallam Atta Market, in Accra, and picking up staple food items and purchasing these items with his own money and using these “specimens” to partially calculate the rate of inflation in the country and, in turn, getting peer-reviewed by fellow Ghanaian economics professors based in Halifax, Canada, and being proven accurate to the core or an exact decimal digit. We are not talking about an armchair theorist or intellectual here!

And by the way, isn’t Mr. Pratt well aware of the fact of then-Candidate Akufo-Addo’s having selected Dr. Bawumia as his 2008 Presidential Running-Mate purely on the basis of his yeomanly work with Dr. Paul Acquah at the Bank of Ghana, including the landmark re-denomination of the Cedi which had at the time been effectively reduced to a shinplaster or a veritable junk by the operatives of the Rawlings-led government of the National Democratic Congress? And if, indeed, Vice-President Bawumia had done nearly even half as badly with Ghana’s economic development as Mr. Pratt recently claimed on the Accra-based Metro-TV’s “Good Morning Ghana” current affairs news program, why was the Akufo-Addo government, of which Dr. Bawumia has been the Second-in-Command for nearly eight years now, having also been twice consecutively retained at Jubilee House?

It goes without saying that whatever politically or morally damning comments and/or criticisms it is that the nephew of the legendary albeit thoroughgoing corrupt Mr. Kojo Botsio has to make about the son of the equally legendary Alhaji Mumuni Bawumia, obviously tells us far more about the critic-commentator himself than they tell us about the undeserved subject of such gratuitously pejorative remarks and/or criticisms.

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
June 27, 2024
E-mail: [email protected]