By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Oct. 11, 2015
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
It began with the Mills-led government of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), when the junior national team, the Black Meteors, won the World Cup, after having been promised a handsome reward by the now-late President John Evans Atta-Mills. Like Mr. Ibrahim Sannie Daara, the Communications Director of the Ghana Football Association (GFA), President Mills would inform the visibly stunned teenagers as follows: “We shall reward you at the right time.” It was one of the most embarrassing moments for Ghana before the global community. But it wasn’t the very first time that the bizarre character of the proverbial Ghanaian Personality was being subjected to a test of honesty and being found to be scandalously wanting.
Well, Mr. Ibrahim Sannie Daara was reported to have recently told the Black Queens all-female national soccer team that “There will be better days ahead.” The irony of ironies is that the team had just won a gold medal at the All-African Games in Brazzaville, the capital of the Republic of Congo. Yes, “There will be better days ahead,” Mr. Ibrahim Sannie Daara. One can be quite certain that since he was appointed to the job, the GFA’s Communications Director has yet to miss a paycheck or bonus payment. Why our leaders display such abject stupidity when it comes to meeting their end of pre-agreed bargains continues to stagger the progressive mind. At the time of the publication of the news story in reference, the visibly traumatized members of the Black Queens were reported to be holed up in their hotel rooms and flatly refusing to leave until the Mahama government and the executive operatives of the GFA had satisfied their end of the bargain.
There clearly appears to be a gender-biased, or raw sexist, edge to this flagrant decision to shortchange the 2015 soccer squad of the Black Queens. I am often accused of a blistering lack of any sense of patriotism, when I call our leaders out on their perennial and seemingly genetic predisposition to the crass exhibition of irresponsibility, both at the personal and the official levels. This gross exhibition of abject irresponsibility may have been what provoked Mr. Moses Foh-Amoaning, the University of Ghana’s law professor and member of the Dzamefe Commission, to bitterly complain about the morally offensive failure of the Mahama government to implement some of the most significant recommendations of the commission’s report. For me, though, it was quite clear from the way President Mahama went about the process of establishing the commission that the Chief Resident of the Flagstaff House did not intend to take the findings and recommendations of the commission any more seriously than a rack of toilet tissues.
Prof. Foh-Amoaning further proves the righteousness of his argument by noting the downright idiotic repeat of the $3 million Brazil Conundrum on September 5, when the government, once again, caused the lifting of another tranche of millions of dollars of bonus payments to be flown to the Black Stars, the country’s senior national soccer team, in Kigali, Rwanda, ahead of the team’s 2017 African Cup of Nations (AFCON) qualifier against the host country. The Black Queens obviously did not qualify for the same blue-ribbon treatment, in spite of the name of their team, because they have never figured into the priority agenda of the Mahama-led National Democratic Congress.
My beef with Prof. Foh-Amoaning on this particular subject is his rather comical presumption that just because he and Justice Dzamefe had been hoodwinked into believing in their blue-ribbon commission status automatically meant that whatever findings and recommendations presented by the two men would be promptly implemented to the letter by President Mahama. Now they have been generously served the rude awakening that I have always expected would be served them. Mr. Foh-Amoaning is “only” a law school professor, and so I would not fault him for apparently being so naïve about the nihilistic dynamics of the proverbial Ghanaian Personality and Character. Maybe a little bit of his anger and disappointment would healthily dissipate, if I told him Mr. Joe Appiah’s story of sharing the same prison cell at Nsawam with the widely acclaimed Doyen of Gold Coast and Modern Ghanaian Politics, and hearing Dr. J. B. Danquah ask in utter exasperation and, perhaps, desperation as well: “My dear nephew, is Ghana worth fighting for?”
Dr. Danquah had expended much intellectual and cultural capital grooming the young Mr. Kwame Nkrumah for Ghanaian political leadership, only to have the latter seismically betray his trust and affection. Of course, Dr. Danquah would shortly pay dearly with his life.