Allotey Jacobs
By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
When the three-time Vice-Presidential Candidate of Ghana’s main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, calls the unconscionable robber-barons of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) by their real name, the former Deputy-Governor of the nation’s central treasury, the Bank of Ghana, knows precisely what he is talking about.
And so far, the Oxbridge- and Simon Fraser-educated economist has backed up his every damning characterization of the Mahama-led regime of the National Democratic Congress with facts and figures. And so it is not clear just why the Central Regional Chairman of the NDC finds it necessary to draw ad-hominem attacks into the equation (See “Bawumia is a ‘Product of Thievery’ – Allotey Jacobs” Starrfmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 10/2/16).
The fact that Dr. Bawumia’s father, the late Alhaji Mumuni Bawumia, was once named Chairman of the Council-of-State by the kleptocratic Chairman Jerry John Rawlings has absolutely nothing to do with the genius and spot-on economic analyses of the gross administrative incompetence of President John Dramani Mahama.
But even more significant must be underscored the fact that by the time that he was appointed Chairman of the decidedly effete Council-of-State, the veritable and abjectly corrupted brainchild of Dr. J. B. Danquah, Alhaji Mumuni Bawumia was already a distinguished elderly statesman.
And so it could not be truly said, as Mr. Benjamin Allotey Jacobs would have Ghanaians believe, that Alhaji Mumuni Bawumia was afforded an auspicious professional beginning in life by Chairman Rawlings, a man young enough to have been Alhaji Bawumia’s own son; and very likely, a man whose own birth mother could well have been a younger sister to the elder Mr. Bawumia.
What is more accurate and can readily pass muster, if subjected to the most stringent of scrutiny, is the fact that the appointment of Alhaji Mumuni Bawumia as the First Chairman of the Council-of-State in Ghana’s Fourth Republic, in 1992, was clearly aimed at soliciting the approval and blessings of an already successful and distinguished Ghanaian citizen.
By the same token, the decision by the elder Mr. Bawumia to accept the chairmanship of the Council-of-State may well have brought a patently undeserved but direly needed credibility to the faux-democratically elected government of the Rawlings-led National Democratic Congress.
And therefore it could not be accurately said, as Mr. Allotey Jacobs would have his captive audience of NDC apparatchiks believe, that without the “revolutionary” thievishness of Chairman Rawlings and his P/NDC Abongo Boys, Alhaji Mumuni Bawumia would have decidedly died a pauper.
The implication here, of course, is that, somehow, without the emergence and tragicomic entrenchment of Chairman Rawlings on the national political scene, Alhaji Bawumia would, somehow, not have become as successful as he already was and had been pre even the AFRC era and by extension, would not have been able to sponsor his equally distinguished son for advanced studies at some of the most renowned and prestigious higher educational institutions abroad.
The fact of the matter, and one that party machine operatives like Mr. Allotey Jacobs may not want to hear, is that it was the near-total destruction of the country’s higher educational system that may well have forced the elder Alhaji Bawumia to ship his son abroad for schooling and be prepared for far better prospects than the accidental strictures of time and the generational gap had afforded Mr. Mumuni Bawumia.
Does this brief and incontrovertibly tenuous association of Alhaji Bawumia and the Rawlings-led National Democratic Congress make the elder Mamprusi chieftain equally guilty of the heinous and untold atrocities perpetrated against innocent and unsuspecting Ghanaian citizens? I sincerely doubt it.
Which is why one is at a complete loss to hear the Central Region’s NDC chair superciliously accuse Dr. Bawumia of gross ingratitude to the NDC’s political Galamseyers: “He is ungrateful. The good things we did for his father for him to be able to take care of him. He doesn’t appreciate it [sic].
Rather, he is desecrating us.” Then again, what is so sacred about an unconscionable band of butchers and robber-barons who shoot their way to the nation’s seat of governance, and then cynically stuffing our ballot boxes, declare themselves to have been democratically elected to rule by a landslide margin of the people’s mandate? Could have fooled me, Benjamin Allotey Jacobs!