Ghana will never cease to amaze me as a country. This a country where its Vice President writes a book and names it ‘My First Coup D’état’, and yet not a lot of thought has gone into the motive for writing the book and the author becomes a President by default. President John Dramani Mahama, the only President to have succeeded to the seat following the death of a president, wrote this book and went to USA to launch amid all the pomp and pageantry. Within days of launching this book, the president, his boss, dies in circumstances that can best be described as mysterious. Till today, there has been no inquiry into the death of President Mills even though the causes of death are as many as the number of authorities that have spoken of it.
In the book, President Mahama concludes in the last paragraph, “All the decisions I have made in my life were regularly plagued with doubt. It can be challenging to sustain that feeling of hope or the belief that things will turn out for the best. Again and again, I have felt like that boy Dramani, on the bicycle going downhill fast, without any brakes and not knowing which way to turn.” It is worth pointing out that that this book has just been written and was only launched in July last year.
These sentiments expressed in the book speak volumes about the writer's motives. Coup makers often overthrow, kill in the process and succeed. This is often done in a violent mode unannounced and often unheard of before it happens. In 'My First Coup D’état’, the writer smoothly and subtly announces his intention and goes on to implement it as a smooth operator, and funnily gets away with it. Like a bicycle rolling downhill and in a kind of obsessive compulsory action, things just happen without any brakes and not knowing which way to turn. Thinks happen like tornado, destroying everything in its path.
From the time President Mills died it seemed as it President Mahama had hit the path to his second coup d'état with the country. The sudden change of clothing, phoney acts of care, deep wallowing in acts of profound corruption, and change of direction from selfless style of Mills to the winner-takes- it-all approach were the initial hallmarks of the new coup d'état. President Mahama's second coup d'état was scheduled in with a team of rottweilers at the president's office who ate up press freedoms, concealed financial improprieties and bought all the institutions of democracy and rule of law.
Mahama's second coup d'état is calculated, planned and taking a stranglehold of our nation and peeling back all the collective fight we all put in to salvage the nation from the 31st December coup d'état. This is a coup that has ushered a "create loot and share" regime. The chronicle of Mahama's corruption have been the hallmarks of this second coup d'état. What makes this second d'état so endemic' is that almost all the state institutions are in on it. The Electoral Commission stole the last election to advance the course of the coup d'état. The Peace Council drummed into our ears the need to accept the fraudulent elections, the police were unleashed into the streets to put the fear of the challenge to this coup into the citizenry and our Supreme Court crowned the coup with the most perverse judgement in our history.
The semblance between his 'First Coup D'état' and the Second is his seeming obsessive compulsory disorder. His lack of control on the bike as a child has matured his lack of control in putting his hands in the national till. From STX, Cuba, SUBA, Embraer, Merchant Bank and GYEEDA, the list is endless. For a man who managed within four months of becoming a president managed to put a hole of GHC 24million in the national coffers to help him steal the 2012 elections, he must suffer from this compulsory disorder. Now with a national debt at HIPC proportions of GHC 45million, this compulsive coup maker is preparing the minds of Ghanaians for 2016, prophesying that we will renew his mandate.
Now the compulsive and serial coup d’état plotter - that ‘boy Dramani’- has planted his team or rottweilers to bark on the roof tops on his behalf that the only uniting factor of our sorry lives as Ghanaians under President Mahama, which is football must be named after him. Ghana’s success at football and our qualification to next year’s World Cup should be attributed to John Mahama, and for that reason that boy Dramani’s face should be embossed on the chest of our boys. Imagine what insult that will be to crown his coup-de-grace on mother Ghana.
In the concluding paragraph of, ‘My Second Coup D’état’, President John Dramani Mahama, would conclude, “All the decisions I have made as a president were regularly aided with doubt but influenced by the money acquired with a little help from my friends. The till I came to inherit from oil I have spent crudely to the bone. It can be challenging to sustain that feeling that somehow things will last forever and Ghanaians will fall for it so long as the booty trickles down to my favourites. Again and again, I have felt that the boy Dramani is back in his saddle this time running Ghana into the abyss but lacking the control to stop it”
Kwesi Atta-Krufi Hayford.