Late former president John Evans Atta Mills
I don’t know that the Okyenhene, Osagyefo Amoatia Ofori-Panyin, II, necessarily erred on the side of mendacity when His Majesty reported in the wake of the death of former Vice-President Kwesi Bekoe Amissah-Arthur in the gymnasium of the Ghana Airforce, while exercising, that there had not been any ambulance available to rush the dying man to the nearby 37th Military Hospital (See “Matilda Amissah-Arthur Exposes Okyenhene on Husband’s Death” MyNewsGh.com / Ghanaweb.com 10/21/19).
The stark and incontrovertible fact of the matter still stands that a dying former Vice-President Amissah-Arthur was rushed to the 37th Military Hospital in a privately owned pickup vehicle, and not an officially designated ambulance, as would routinely have been the case in any reasonably well-functioning civilized democratic culture even on the African continent itself.
So, indeed, whether Mrs. Matilda Amissah-Arthur, Ghana’s former Second Lady, chooses to smugly sanitize the clearly embarrassing circumstances under which her husband perished or not will not amount to the metaphorical hill-of-beans. The fact of the matter is that the man is long rotten-dead and gone, and absolutely no amount of badmouthing Osagyefo Amoatia Ofori-Panyin, II, is going to resurrect the late former Governor of the Bank of Ghana. At any rate, what is significant to underscore here is the unmistakable implication of the eyewitness testimony of Nana Amoatia Ofori-Panyin, II, which is that Messrs.
John Dramani Mahama and Kwesi Bekoe Amissah-Arthur had, during their tenure at the Presidency, done very little to absolutely nothing to significantly improve the general quality of healthcare delivery in the country at large, which was precisely why while in the tragic throes of death in the gymnasium of the Ghana Airforce, in our nation’s capital of Accra, there had been absolutely no officially or properly designated ambulance to ferry the former Vice-President to the nearest and foremost hospital of the Ghana Armed Forces.
As well, the fact of whether Mr. Amissah-Arthur had died in the back of a classy or plush Mercedes Benz, or the backseat of a double-cabin pickup truck, rather than the tin-hard flatbed or bucket of a pickup truck is decidedly immaterial. The man is dead and consigned well into the dustbin of history, as the cliché goes, whether or not he was a stickler for health who did not have diabetes or high-blood pressure.
My only little problem or concern here regards the patently infelicitous decision by Osagyefo Amoatia Ofori-Panyin to officiously and voluntarily step up to the proverbial plate and into the role of a self-appointed Amissah-Arthur Family Spokesman. There is something indelibly undignified about this kind of servile behavior coming from a major legitimately invested traditional ruler. Unless, of course, he had been personally and specifically approached by the media, by virtue of the fact of him having first-hand witnessed the apparent collapse and expiration of the former Vice-President, there was absolutely no reason for Osagyefo Amoatia Ofori-Panyin to have so inexcusably played the patently infra-dig role that he so scandalously appears to have elected for himself.
With the preceding duly noted, still coming as it strikingly does right on the heels of Mr. John Dramani Mahama’s dastardly albeit abortive attempt to seriously and globally impugn the credibility of The Asantehene, Otumfuo Osei-Tutu, II, in the wake of the latter’s otherwise splendorous presentation in the forum of the United Nations’ General Assembly, right here in New York City, vis-à-vis the significant contributions of traditional Ghanaian rulers to our nation’s democratic culture, makes the keen observer of the Ghanaian political scene wonder whether Mrs. Amissah-Arthur has been bribed by some Mahama assigns to say precisely what she is widely alleged to have told Mr. David Ampofo, host of the talking-heads program called “Time with David.” We ask the preceding question because during the state-sponsored memorial service held in honor of her deceased husband at the Accra International Conference Center, the widow of the former Vice-President caustically castigated former President John Dramani Mahama for having deliberately and systematically afforded the latter’s official right-hand man short-shrift treatment of a sort that flagrantly verged on downright servility.
Ultimately, however, what her supposed “exposé” actually achieves is to convincingly facilitate the portrayal of Mrs. Amissah-Arthur as a cheap publicity-hungry and a pathologically self-pitying shrew who has absolutely nothing worthwhile or meaningful to do with her time. She would obviously be better off vigorously lobbying the Akufo-Addo government to open an inquest into the “mysterious” death of President John Evans Atta-Mills, the man who appointed her late husband to the post of substantive Governor of the Bank of Ghana, and the hearty and rather scandalously curious celebration of President Mills’ death by the then-Vice-President Mahama, who would flippantly explain off the “sudden death” of his immediate boss as an auspicious and timely act of Divine Providence, one that was perfectly aimed at crowning the former Rawlings’ Communication Minster as “The first post-independence-born President” of the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana.
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