Julius Debrah
By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Mr. Julius Debrah must be a very desperate man. The Mahama Chief-of-Staff second-bananas who was brought in after the inner-circle gang of northerner- and Trokosi-packed presidency had been nudged out to strategically prepare for the reelection campaign of the Gonja petty chieftain, has been trolling the media airwaves making a complete nuisance of himself.
I don’t know how much they pay these mercenaries these days, but it is quite obvious that if something drastic is not done by his doctors and healthcare advisers to help him reduce his weight in the offing, the Mahama presidency is quite certain to lose more than its residential lease at the Flagstaff House in the wake of the December 7 general election.
Let’s be frank with our readers and well-wishers: the fact of the matter is that the man is beginning to look bizarre and horrible like an elephant fattened for the slaughterhouse, and is obviously in danger of suffering a massive cardiac arrest one of these days.
It is our prayer that some expert gets called in to inspect his diet and make the necessary changes and adjustments to prevent the man from detonating, one of these days, like a human nuclear bomb. But, of course, all this is a purely private affair and decidedly beside the reasons for writing this column tonight. It has more to do with the cognitive temperament or mental state of the 50-year-old butterball.
Maybe our National Psychiatrist ought to be called in to examine the clinical state of Mr. Debrah’s mind before this exponentially bulging pachyderm brings down the entire edifice of former President John Agyekum-Kufuor’s Jubilee-Flagstaff House.
It is this much serious. The fact of the matter, since the very inception of the postcolonial era, is that the hallmark of many an incumbent Ghanaian presidential candidate has been to splurge, that is, wastefully and senselessly spread the taxpayer’s money among crowds of spectators, supporters and sympathizers, rather than channel the same towards meaningful and worthwhile national development projects.
Such has been the standard media reportage of the same since the pathologically decadent era of the Kwame Nkrumah-led regime of the Convention People’s Party (CPP).
And so it was absolutely nothing short of the grotesque, when Mr. Debrah reportedly told the host of Joy-FM’s Super-Morning Show that widespread citizen-journalists’ photographs clearly indicating that President John Dramani Mahama had, during his latest stumps at Abossey-Okai, generously distributed wads of Cedi notes to waves of market women was a sheer and pure act of fabrication.
But, of course, what was even more scandalous was Mr. Debrah’s alleged assertion that since the dawn of Ghana’s independence, absolutely no president, prime minister or junta leader has been known to have shared the nation’s monetary wealth with his supporters and sympathizers while on the hustings (See “Mahama May Have Been Sharing Leaflets, Not Cash” MyJoyOnline.com / Ghanaweb.com 9/22/16).
The news report goes further to state that Mr. Debrah claims that the preceding was the first thing that he learned as President Mahama’s Chief-of-Staff. “I sincerely believe, knowing President Mahama, that he wouldn’t deliberately go to a marketplace and start throwing money around.
He is a very experienced person.” Well, the fact of the matter is that President Mahama, indeed, did deliberately go to the Abossey-Okai Market for the express purpose of roiling up voter support and ended up spraying paper money into the crowd of supporters and sympathizers that showed up to listen to him.
What is more, Mr. Debrah is not only not calling his boss “a wise man,” but rather an “experienced politician,” we cannot simply take the Mahama point-man’s denial at face value because Mr. Debrah was not even with the President at the Abossey-Okai Market.
The Mahama Chief-of-Staff also claims not to have seen widespread pictures showing our payola-prone leader at his electioneering-bribery best. Now Mr. Debrah would also have Ghanaians believe that one of the salient lessons he has learned, since being named Head Butler at the Flagstaff House, is the existence of a longstanding tradition which has Ghanaian leaders printing reams of electioneering posters and distributing them to spectators and sympathizers. Could have fooled me, Mr. Butterball.