He may very well have the moral strength of truth and authority to upbraid the rancid hypocrisy of his associates among the top-echelon membership of the country’s presently Main Opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) for being quick to caustically castigate the National Communications Officer of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), Mr. Samuel “Sammy” Gyamfi, for seeming to recklessly splurge in public, in particular, regarding the widely alleged sum of $800 (USD) that the young man man who also presently doubles as the Acting Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Ghana Gold Board was recently shown on Social Media gifting self-styled Christian Evangelist Patricia “Mama Pat” Asieduaa – aka “Agradaa” (See “MInority NPP Has No Moral Right to Criticize Sammy Gyamfi Over Dollar Gift to Agradaa – NPP’s Owusu Bempah” Modernghana.com 5/12/25).
Several critics of the 38-year-old native of Sunyani, in the Akufo-Addo-created Bono Region, have focused much more on the “optical” implications of what they term as the “kindly gesture” by the recent graduate of the Ghana Law School, instead of both the moral implications of the message that such opulent display of “Dollarized Wealth” sends to the abjectly impoverished and the long-suffering overwhelming majority of the country’s poor and destitute, as well as the diplomatically well represented Global Community at large, at a time when the country, as usual, is suffering from a neck-crushing fiscal burden that has seen our leaders make an incessant mad dash for the Sharky Lenders and Creditors of the twin Bretton-Woods establishments of The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), for such relatively meager sums of fiscal loan assistance packages as $200-$500 million (USD), to plug up or complement perennial budgetary shortfalls deliberately created by our multimillionaire state-capturing bipartisan leaderships of both the presently ruling National Democratic Congress and the country’s Main Opposition New Patriotic Party and the “Feeder Allies” of these two institutional polarities of Ghana’s Fourth Republican political culture and pathologically kleptocratic regimes of profligate parasites.
You see, the problem with the facile presumption by Mr. Ernest Kofi Owusu Bempah, that is, the National Democratic Congress and the National Democratic Party (NDP) crossover member and Deputy National Communications Director of the New Patriotic Party, regarding the question of whether, indeed, Mr. Sammy Gyamfi can afford to publicly and opulently dole out humongous wads of crispy $100 US Dollar notes, inheres in the fact that as of this writing, nobody knows the monetary and the material wealth of any of the key players of the Mahama 2.0 regime or, for that matter, the value of the fiscal and the material wealth of any of the major players of the previous Fourth-Republican governments of both two major political parties and their officially known ideological and feeder allies, going by such names as the Rump-Convention People’s Party (R-CPP) and the Percival Kofi Akpaloo-led Liberal Party of Ghana (LPG).
As one blogger and media columnist recently noted, albeit cynically in praise of a twice nonconsecutively elected President John “European Airbus SE Payola” Dramani Mahama, for 32 years, Ghana’s 1992 Constitution has mandated Assets Declaration by all Elected Politicians and Executive Appointees, beginning with the first diplomatically elected government of the late President Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings, from January 7, 1993, but curiously, absolutely no Fourth-Republican Leader, including the revolutionarily self-righteous Officially Retired Chairman and Flt-Lt. Jeremiah John Rawlings had either themselves followed through with this statutorily entrenched diktat of the 1992 Constitution or prevailed upon their subalterns or minions to rigorously follow through with the same.
And then recently, a pontifically self-proclaimed “Politically Born Again” President Mahama issued a directive demanding that all his appointees declare their assets by collecting and filling forms to the aforesaid effect and then promptly deposit the same with the Office of the Auditor-General. The catch here, though, and that which many observers and critically-thinking members of the general public have remarked upon is the fact that President Mahama did not at the time of his directive also announce the fact of whether such assets, as may be declared by any of the appointees of his government, would be made readily accessible to members of the general public, especially operatives of the media, as allowable under the Freedom-of-Information Act.
Now, Mr. Owusu Bempah’s argument that $10,000 (USD) is absolutely nothing more than a mere pittance to a politician of the caliber of Mr. Sammy Gyamfi does not pass muster with many of us avid students of Ghana’s political economy, unless, of course, Mr. Owusu Bempah could also inform the members of the Global Ghanaian Community about the Take-Home Dollar Value of the Official Monthly Salary of the President of the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana and his cabinet, ministerial and executive appointees.
As for the anecdote about some New Patriotic Party appointees of the previous Akufo-Addo government “spraying $50,000” crispy currency notes “on ladies behind the scenes,” it is purely just that, sheer anecdote, unless the former Head of Communications of the Ghana Gas Company could also provide forensically credible evidence such as has been incontrovertibly provided in the case of the Sammy Gyamfi display of reckless opulence. This is absolutely in no way to assert or suggest that operatives of the previous Akufo-Addo government had conducted themselves any morally and/or civically well above board or any better than their counterparts among the vanguard ranks of the National Democratic Congress.
For, as Yours Truly has often said, having been literally raised within the same cultural and geopolitical milieu, it comes as absolutely no happenstance or accident at all that the Sammy Gyamfis of the Mahama-led 2.0 regime of the National Democratic Congress would conduct themselves wantonly and profligately as the Gabriel “Gabby” Asare Otchere-Darkos of the twice, consecutively elected “Agyapadie” regime of the Akufo-Addo-led New Patriotic Party.
Now, what we are, presumably, waiting to learn from a reliable source or reliable sources, regards precisely the amount of hard dollar currency notes that Mr. Gyamfi, the Unofficial Roving Ambassador of the National Democratic Congress to the United States of America, had on him in the SUV in which he was captured on videotape displaying his “Midas Touch, “Agradaaistically,” on Mothers’ Day on May 11, 2025.
By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
E-mail: [email protected]
