By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Dec. 26, 2015
E-mail: [email protected]
In the wake of the seismic media exposé on the GH? 3.6 million city-bus “rebranding” scandal that prompted the resignation of Mrs. Dzifa Akua Attivor, the Minister of Transport, a notorious ethnic chauvinist and a National Democratic Congress’ propagandist wrote and published an article cynically disputing the glaring electioneering propaganda motive behind this epic scam captioned “Do Ghanaians Not Already Know President Mahama?” (See Modernghana.com 12/26/15).
I had raised the issue of the apparent fact that the Flagstaff House and/or its ministerial assigns may well have deviously concocted the quaint idea of celebrating Ghana’s past presidents in a sly pretext of affording the country’s presidential incumbent, Mr. John Dramani Mahama, an undue advantage over his most formidable challenger of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo.
Well, in order to fully appreciate the flagrant deviousness of the author of the aforementioned article’s argument, one only has to recall the crude intrigue that was brought to bear on Mr. George Boateng, the 45-year-old Oyarifa, Greater-Accra, Constituency Youth Organizer of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), who had boldly and fiercely mounted a challenge against Mr. Mahama for the 2016 presidential nomination of the ruling party.
The logical question to ask here is whether if, indeed, as the author of the aforementioned article claims, President Mahama was so confident of his household-name recognition by the average eligible and prospective Ghanaian voter, he would have used brash and abrasive proxies like party General-Secretary Johnson Asiedu-Nketia and National Organizer Kofi Adams to publicly humiliate and frontally prevent Mr. Boateng from exercising his inalienable democratic right to contest President Mahama?
We must also point out that Mr. Boateng had campaigned and stated his overriding motive for challenging Mr. Mahama on grounds of the latter’s gross administrative incompetence. Then also, we need to highlight the fact that despite Ghanaians being told that party delegates, or electors, had resoundingly endorsed the decision to have President Mahama run unopposed in the 2016 NDC presidential primary election, Mr. Mahama had still ended up being rejected by more than 60,000 delegates, or at least some 5-percent of the same delegates who had been widely reported to have unreservedly endorsed the presidential re-nomination of Mr. Mahama.
We also know that the preceding flat re-nomination rejection figure may very well have been doctored or fiddled with because, according to Ms. Rachel Appoh, the former Mahama deputy-cabinet appointee and NDC-Member of Parliament for Gomoa-Central, she personally had to bribe a remarkable percentage of delegates in her constituency, located in the Central Region, in order to ensure a drastic reduction in the number of rejection votes cast against the President.
But, perhaps, what is even more significant to observe on the latter count is the fact that according to Ms. Appoh, the overriding reason for those who compromised their rejection votes against Mr. Mahama, in exchange for monetary kickbacks, was that the very government which they had so enthusiastically and overwhelmingly voted into power had effectively turned its back on them.
Well, if it were really true that President Mahama had such an unassailable household-name recognition as to be practically and absolutely in no need of having his portraits, together with those of other strategically selected past Ghanaian presidents, sprayed onto state-owned and operated buses, why would Mr. Mahama be frenziedly touring the country and vigorously campaigning for reelection, on the heels of the just concluded “Arise and Build” electioneering campaign tour of the nation by his main political opponent, Nana Akufo-Addo?