By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
For those of our readers who may not quite remember the National Youth Organizer of the ruling National Democratic Congress, Mr. Ludwig Akpene Hlodze is the rambunctious young rascal whom former President Jerry John Rawlings accused, within weeks after the election of President John Evans Atta-Mills, of leading the criminally profligate and thuggish life of petty Mafia capo. Back then, the former Ghanaian strongman angrily reported that Mr. Hlodze had acquired a lavish motorcade with which the NDC youth organizer ostentatiously tooled around the Greater-Accra metropolis and his own neighborhood drunkenly throwing his weight about.
In essence, Mr. Hlodze woefully lacks the requisite credibility and moral heft to presume to instruct Ghanaian voters on whom they ought to elect as their next president come Election 2012 (See “ ‘Nana Addo-Bawumia Ticket, The Value Is The Same’ – NDC” Peacefmonline.com 3/30/12). At any rate, it takes only a pot- or cocaine-head not to recognize the foresighted selection of Dr. Mahamadu Bawumia as the running-mate of Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo. And on the latter score must also be promptly observed, even as noted earlier and elsewhere, that the 2008 electoral defeat of the Akufo-Addo-Bawumia ticket had far more to with predictable and widely anticipated internal party wrangling than any unique visionary flair that Ghanaian voters may have auspiciously recognized in the jaded and effete leadership track-record of Messrs. John Evans Atta-mills and John Dramani Mahama.
Indeed, were the latter state of affairs not the case, the now-President Atta-Mills would not have lost, for an unprecedented third time, to a presidential candidate of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) in the first round of Election 2008. Even with such blatantly ill-conceived “state-side” policy moves as the purchase of the Gulf-Stream jets, the clearly deliberate omission of Nana Akufo-Addo’s name from the original list of candidates slated for the National Merit Honors Awards, even while the same list sported the curious names of cutthroat NDC executioners and key operatives like Messrs. Kojo Tsikata, Atta-Mills and Mahama, among a monstrosity of others, and the at once ill-timed and scandalous decision by former President Kufuor to release the jailed taxicab drivers, largely on disorderly conduct charges, the then-Candidate Atta-Mills who was contesting the presidency for the third time barely managed to edge out Candidate Akufo-Addo with a relatively marginal 40,000 votes or less than a half-percentage point in the electoral runoff.
It squarely goes without saying that it is in striking recognition of the looming possibility of a crushing defeat for the entire NDC constabulary that has set the cynical likes of Messrs. Fifi Kwetey, Asiedu-Nketiah (a.k.a. The Bui Dam Woyome), Quarshigah and Hlodze screaming their brains and guts out.
It is also rather laughable that just about the same time that the NDC has been woefully unable to appreciably stem the septic tide of mounting peaks of garbage and raw sewage in cities and major towns across the country, Mr. Hlodze and his fellow party hacks and pathological scam-artists and steam-blowing propagandists would be bragging about the so-called Better Ghana Agenda of the Mills-Mahama government and be unconscionably grandstanding about some two largely drawing board-oriented science and technology universities that Uncle Tarkwa-Atta is alleged to have established in the Brong-Ahafo and Volta regions.
“Hitherto, people from the Volta and Brong-Ahafo regions have [had] to commute to the Ashanti regional capital [of] Kumasi; Cape Coast, in the Central Region; Tamale, in the Northern Region, as well as Accra to access tertiary education, but now the NDC government has made it possible for the teeming youth[s] in these two regions to access tertiary education in their own [respective] regions,” Mr. Hlodze was recently quoted to have gushed.
Maybe somebody needs to tell this NDC corporate scumbag that it was NPP patriarchs like Drs. J. B. Danquah, Asafu-Adjei and Nanka-Bruce who put the country’s flagship academy, the University of Ghana, where it is today, and directly out of which Mr. Kwame Nkrumah spun the University of Science and Technology (now renamed after the Show Boy) and the University of Cape Coast. And so, really, when it comes to the seminal establishment and promotion of scholarship, the NDC scam-artists have yet to prove themselves.
In spite of the NDC’s obnoxiously stentorian and mendacious propaganda campaign Blitz Krieg, come September 2012 and eons beyond, most youths from the Brong-Ahafo and Volta regions will still be trooping to Accra, Kumasi, Cape Coast, Winneba and Tamale for cost-effective and enviable tertiary educational opportunities, for the stark and simple reason that, even as already pointed out, fuzzy architectural designs on mental drawing boards do not viable universities make.
Mr. Hlodze can also blow stinky steam about his NDC paymasters having “seen two regional hospitals added to the [already existing] stock across the country.” The grim fact of the matter is that the NDC’s “Cash-and-Carry” pseudo-socialist health policy never got any impoverished Ghanaian citizen treated or heavily expectant mothers have their babies delivered safely and soundly at any of our nation’s major hospitals and health centers. Rather, it was the Kufuor-led New Patriotic Party’s comprehensive National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) that elevated Ghana into the enviable ranks of civilized modern nations.
And then also, why does Mr. Hlodze find it so extremely difficult to credit the Kufuor-led New Patriotic Party with having established the academically and medically crucial School Feeding Program (SFP)? Instead, Mr. Hlodze prefers to shamelessly talk about the NDC’s having “strengthened the School Feeding Program” by mischievously coupling the latter with President Mills’ free uniform and exercise book distribution farce (Whatever happened to the distribution of free textbooks?) as a bona fide part of the largely superficial NDC educational policy. We think we know the answer: And it is because when it comes to constructive, foresighted and progressive policy agenda, the Mills-Mahama-led National Democratic Congress are newly-transferred sophomores on the proverbial block. Simply put, even the most elementary of policies reads like “Greek” to the NDC Mafia squad.
*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is Director of The Sintim-Aboagye Center for Politics and Culture and author of “Danquah v. Nkrumah: In the Words of Richard Mahoney.” E-mail: [email protected].
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