Calling on President John “I Have No Classmates in Ghana” Dramani Mahama to literally step up to the plate and bring the NDC-hired goons who marred the outcome of the Ablekuma-North 2024 Parliamentary-Election Rerun promptly to book, sounded pathetically like what Americans hereabouts call “a broken record.” The truth of the matter is that the blame for the Ablekuma-North’s Electoral Violence and the criminal disruption of the most vital aspect of Ghana’s democratic culture was actually authorized and mandated by the Mahama and the Johnson “The Mosquito” Asiedu-Nketia Posse of Operation Death Incorporated, otherwise known as the terror-sponsoring institutional establishment of the National Democratic Congress, as the entire International Community witnessed on December 7, 2024, when the former National Propaganda Officer, presently renamed National Communications Officer of the National Democratic Congress, literally sicced purposely hired party members, supporters, sympathizers and thugs on officials and employees of the Independent Electoral Commission (I/EC), on the active and the express instigation of both the then Candidate Mahama and the superannuated recent graduate of the Senior-Staff College of the Ghana Armed Forces, namely, “Lt-Col.” Johnson “The Mosquito” Asiedu-Nketia.
The evidence was clear for all to see, because the 38-year-old party apparatchik who sicced the party thugs on the officials and the employees of the Independent Electoral Commission was flanked by a panoply of the National Executives of the Kokomlemle Headquarters of the country’s then main opposition National Democratic Congress. But, of course, former President Mahamudu Bawumia ought to fully and squarely share in the blame for the unspeakably barbaric acts of naked violence that occurred on Friday, July 11, during the Ablekuma-North’s Electoral Rerun of the 2024 Parliamentary Election, for the simple reason that even as Ghana’s then-incumbent and substantive Vice-President, the Walewale native, from the Akufo-Addo-created North-East Region, did absolutely nothing to facilitate the exaction of any disciplinary action against the Mahama and the Johnson “The Mosquito” Asiedu-Nketia-sponsored thugs, with a full-month to go before the proverbial “Changing of the Guards,”
Instead, a scandalously diffident Vice-President Bawumia would lamely call on the then Candidate and President-Elect Mahama to promptly rein in his party’s hired goons and thugs. And for the rest of the duration before the official assumption of the democratic reins of governance, the entire country was literally under siege, largely by vandals recruited by the then President-Elect Mahama and the rest of the key operatives of the soon-to-be the Mahama 2.0 government of the late President Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings-founded National Democratic Congress.
The preceding scandalous exhibition of irredeemable leadership incapacity and the abject lack of courage is primarily why Yours Truly has strongly counseled that this time around, and at least for the next two electoral seasons, the New Patriotic Party’s Kingmakers and Queenmakers ought to completely forego any mouth-watering temptation to allow the Oxbridge and the Simon Fraser, Canada, educated crackerjack and internationally renowned economist another strategically wasteful chance to gun for the Presidential Nomination and/or the Presidential Candidacy of the proverbial Elephant Party.
Dr. Bawumia is decidedly a goner who would be better off serving as Executive-Director of the Ghana National Development-Planning Commission (NDPC). As the tired, old saying goes: “It Takes One to Know One.” Like the immortalized putative Doyen of Gold Coast and Modern Ghanaian Politics, Dr. Joseph (Nana Kwame Kyeretwie) Boakye Danquah, Alhaji Bawumia is far more of a first-rate technocrat and a scholar than a remarkably talented career politician. Plus, you see, the type of Presidential Nominee or Candidate that the New Patriotic Party direly needs, presently, is one who signs his name as Yaw Osei-Adutwum, that is, Ghana’s most progressive and inimitably innovative and dynamic Minister of Education over the past half-century.
You see, but for the timely arrival on the scene and the auspicious intervention of the University of Southern California-trained Academic Administrator, Ghana’s public school system would be irretrievably stuck in the doldrums of rote-learning of the sort that characterized much of the Twentieth Century. On the latter count, we need to, once again, indelibly put it on the public and official record that it was the New Patriotic Party-sponsored Member of Parliament for the Bosomtwe Constituency, in the Asante Region, who introduced the much-coveted STEM – Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics – Curriculum of the kind operated in the world’s most advanced democracies into the country although, for most of his tenure at the Ministry of Education, it was the Manhyia Palace-backed surgeon, Dr. Matthew (Nana Yaw) Opoku-Prempeh – aka NAPO – who had been unjustifiably ceded the credit for this nonesuch yeomanly achievement.
Plus, contrary to what is fast and strategically unhealthily becoming the norm, Ghana’s Fourth Republican Democratic Cultural Dispensation is not of a Dynastic Nature or Political Architecture that necessitates or makes it logically imperative for any former Vice-President to almost invariably or inevitably succeed to the Presidency. In other words, the endgame of the Vice-Presidency, as can be seen in dozens of many globally advanced constitutional democracies, is not absolutely necessarily and logically the Presidency.
There are a legion and an uncountable number of ways for any former Vice-President of any robust constitutional democracy to make him-/herself politically useful and relevant to society at large. And it is patently clear that the Presidency, for which purpose Yours Truly had in recent years counseled then President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo to serve two terms, so as to enable then Vice-President Bawumia build up a formidable Apex Leadership Profile, is clearly not a perfect fit for this quite talented and undeniably astute crackerjack technocrat.
By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
E-mail: [email protected]
