Kofi Adams
He has never held a real 9-to-5 job besides his freeloading trucking with the career freeloaders of the Rawlings-minted National Democratic Congress (NDC). And yet he would have Ghanaians believe that the country’s main opposition leader is expediently engaged in the “politics of convenience.”
It is quite clear that Mr. Kofi Adams, the NDC’s National Organizer, has little to absolutely no appreciation for the basic meaning of the “politics of convenience” as an expression. The last time that he held down any job that approximated the description of a real job, it was to babysit the children of his former benefactor and chief patron, to wit, Chairman Jerry John Rawlings.
And then, he was promoted to taking phone calls and doing errands for Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings and her husband. He had, of course, witnessed Mr. Victor Smith do the same and land a plumb sponging political pork-barrel stint as a diplomat to Eastern Europe, and presently as Ghana’s High Commissioner to Britain.
Mr. Adams is morbidly upset with the three-time Presidential Candidate of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) because Nana Akufo-Addo has dared to tell it like it is, to wit, that in barely five years at the helm, Côte d’Ivoire’s President Alassane Dramane Ouattara has achieved far more by way of economic development for his country than the current National Democratic Congress regime has been able to achieve in seven years (See “Akufo-Addo in Politics of Convenience, Not Principles – Kofi Adams” Graphic.com.gh / Ghanaweb.com 5/31/16).
Not one known to beat about the bush, Nana Akufo-Addo has provided verifiable statistical data to shore up his argument, namely, that whereas la Côte d’Ivoire has been growing and expanding the size of its economy by 9-percent annually, Ghana under President John Dramani Mahama has only been snail-pacing at a diddly 3.9-percent.
Likewise, over the past half-decade, Côte d’Ivoire has earned over $ 12 billion from the export of its agricultural products, whereas the Mahama government has only had a piffling $ 2 billion to show for Ghana’s agricultural exports.
Now, one does not need even a senior high school graduate diploma or certificate to arrive at the all-too-commonsensical conclusion that fielding administrative square pegs like Messrs. Kwesi Ahwoi and Fiifi Kwetey in such an economically critical portfolio as Minister of Agriculture was highly unlikely to facilitate a replication of the “Ouattara Miracle” in Ghana.
Quite refreshingly, Mr. Adams does not dispute the preceding facts; he only faults the erstwhile Kufuor-led government of the New Patriotic Party for not having done enough on the economic front to move the nation forward. Of course, any keen observer of Ghana’s socioeconomic development trajectory, at least since 2001, knows perfectly well that Mr. Adams is lying through his teeth, as it were.
He clearly does not believe in his own vacuously defensive assertions. For instance, it is on reliable and verifiable record that in less than four years of assuming the democratic reins of governance, the Kufuor-led New Patriotic Party administration had expanded Ghana’s economy by more than four-fold; Chairman Rawlings, the P/NDC Godfather, had not been able to even improve on the fragile economy left behind by the late President Hilla “Babini” Limann, after only two-and-half years at the helm, in 20 years!
Ghanaians would brutally and painfully endure the indescribable economic morass that came to be labeled as “Mr. Rawlings’ Necklace,” largely in the form of an acutely unprecedented state of malnutrition, even as the country was sadistically held up as a model of economic development for the rest of the African continent by the IMF and the World Bank, the so-called Bretton Woods establishments.
This is also where the NDC’s National Organizer brazenly exposes himself for the fleering hypocrite and the simpering fool that he indubitably appears to be.
For instance, not quite long ago, Mr. Adams mounted the podium somewhere in the Tamale municipality and presumed to impugn the integrity of the three-time Presidential Candidate of the New Patriotic Party, by claiming insistently that the widely alleged flat refusal of President John Agyekum-Kufuor to staunchly back the presidential ambitions of Nana Akufo-Addo, since 2008, ought to inform the nation, at large that he had absolutely no credible standing as a leader and a politician.
Now, the same Mr. Adams is telling us that the widely remarked gross incompetence of his boss and paymaster, President John Dramani Mahama, ought to be blamed on an equally grossly incompetent President Kufuor! Mr. Adams also says that President Ouattara’s remarkable economic success in la Côte d’Ivoire has been achieved “through the dint of hardwork, right reforms…[and a] methodic [sic] investment in infrastructural development, education, health, roads and ports that are vital to get their economies growing.” And that, indeed, it was precisely the abject lack of such foresight and skills in Mr. Kufuor and his New Patriotic Party that put Ghana in the relatively backward situation in which the country presently finds itself.
And just precisely why has President Mahama not been able to apply the same set of Ouattara skills to appreciably improve the quality of the Kufuor-minted National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), which the Ghana Medical Association (GMA) recently warned is in danger of completely collapsing? I wish Mr. Adams could give us an answer.