It is all a question of credibility track record and on this most significant front, I have absolutely no confidence in the leadership of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), especially vis-a-vis the health status of Vice-President Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang, who was reported by the media about a month ago of having suddenly taken ill. Now, that is, as of the date of this writing, we are being told that the former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cape Coast is on a speedy road to recovery at an unnamed location abroad by President John “Resetting Ghana” Dramani Mahama (See “ ‘Vice President Opoku-Agyemang Recovering Well, She Will Soon Join Us’ – Mahama” Modernghana.com 4/25/25).
You see, the false propaganda-spinning operatives of the ruling National Democratic Congress have taken us down this murky road before; and when, finally, the proverbial dust settled, Ghanaians were traumatically slapped upside their noggins and discombobulated to learn, shortly thereafter, that, in fact, it had all been an April Fool’s Hoax that had been strategically calculated and orchestrated by a state-capturing cabal of pathological cynics and thoroughgoing political scam-artists and morally irredeemable and despicably unconscionable megalomaniacs.
The preceding narrative, of course, is in direct and unmistakable reference to the chain of cloudy events that culminated in the seismic and the politically and morally traumatizing death of then President John Evans “Woyome Mega-Heist” Atta-Mills on July 24, 2012. As I vividly recall, several weeks prior to this most painful event, a visibly indisposed Prof. Mills – as the former University of Ghana Law School Associate Professor was also affectionately known and called – had been paraded, circus fashion, in retrospect, around the vicinity of the Kotoka International Airport (KIA), shortly after arriving from a medical-treatment tour or trip to the United States of America, where the University of Ghana and the University of London alumnus had also partly studied and taught Taxation Law, and supposedly been given a clean bill of health by his doctors in New York City.
It would shortly turn out that, in fact, President Mills had only been given a clean bill of health upon his arrival at the VVIP Lounge at the KIA by the quacky spinmeisters and the spin doctors of the Johnson “The Mosquito” Asiedu-Nketia-chaperoned National Democratic Congress in Accra, not New York City. And then, finally, as had been suspected all along by some of us avid watchers of Ghana’s Fourth Republican Political Terrain, almost as if out of nowhere, a then Vice-President Mahama had appeared in a media multicast looking jolly and “heartily” informing the nation and the global Ghanaian community that an “inscrutable Divine Providence” had, somehow, deemed it to be historically “serendipitous and opportune” to literally knock the aging and publicly bumbling President Atta-Mills, so that the first postcolonial-born Ghanaian leader could seasonably assume the democratic reins of governance.
If, indeed, as his so-called Minister for Government Communications, Felix Ofosu-Kwakye, reportedly claims in a media release, the removal and the redeye flying of Vice-President Naana Opoku-Agyemang from her hospital bed at the University of Ghana’s Medical Center (UGMC) and out of the country was at the express instructions and/or the recommendation of the doctors of the Vice-President, then, of course, it absolutely goes without saying that whatever “Resetting” of Ghana’s development agenda may be clearly about, obviously does not include the significant and the meaningful upgrading of our nation’s healthcare standard and system as a whole, all such pontifical political grandstanding notwithstanding.
It was also characteristically, predictably and perfectly in synch with NDC’s populist propaganda game plan for President Mahama to have chosen the occasion for the launching of his government’s conspicuously and unarguably tacky and morally and culturally unsavory so-called Sanitary Pad Distribution Campaign, to inform his countrymen and women about the health status or progress report on the medical condition of Vice-President Opoku-Agyemang, whose visibly poor and failing health has been prime grist of local Ghanaian media gossip for quite sometime now.
At any rate, why hadn’t the President all the more appropriately delegated the launching of his Sanitary Pad Distribution Campaign for teenage and adolescent Ghanaian school children and the general public to the relevant and the officially designated cabinet appointee or ministerial portfolio holder? You see, this is not the very first time that the Mahama regime has attempted to play pickleball or “chaskele” with the country’s healthcare system, especially coming right on the heels of the widely reported death of a patient at the Tamale Teaching Hospital (TTH) as a result of the shameful lack of adequate provision of beds at the oldest and the foremost public hospital in the so-called Five Northern Regions.
We are also reliably informed that the aforesaid “bedless” patient perished at the late Gen. Ignatius Kutu Acheampong-established Tamale Teaching Hospital due to the scarcity of medical specialists in the country, a critical quality-of-health-and-life predicament that the previous twice, consecutively elected New Patriotic Party-sponsored Akufo-Addo Government had seriously attempted to remedy by introducing a medical specialists’ training program in the country’s medical schools. This scandalous and criminally pathological addiction to flying our leaders out of the country for advanced medical treatment abroad at the expense of Ghanaian taxpayers, on the flimsiest pretext, ought to tell any progressive-minded Ghanaian citizen that, indeed, it is rather President Mahama, and not his immediate successor and predecessor, to wit, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, who has been grossly incompetently driving Ghana’s development agenda and trajectory in reverse gear, contrary to what the Bole-Bamboi native, from the Akufo-Addo-created Savannah Region, would have the rest of the nation and the members of the global Ghanaian community believe.
It also goes without saying that the overwhelming majority of patriotic and progressive-minded Ghanaian citizens wish Vice-President Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang a speedy recovery and good health. But it also equally goes without saying that “Home-Cooked Food” is almost invariably much more delicious, better prepared, cheaper and healthier than food prepared and cooked by strangers for total strangers, whose primary motive for such commercial cooking is decidedly, purely and unarguably a sheer matter of the profit margin.
In short, as morally enlightened and civilized humans, we need to first love ourselves, and then we can expect to be loved by total strangers. Yes, we direly need to love ourselves and our lives well enough to ensure the best of our healthcare needs for ourselves. So far, in this sphere of the essence of our humanity, Ghanaian leaders have been a complete mess and a great disappointment.
By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
E-mail: [email protected]
