By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
July 19, 2014
I am quite certain that it was a genuine diplomatic faux-pas. I am, of course, talking about the alleged U.S. Embassy tweeter riposte to President John Dramani Mahama's rather insolent and downright condescending exhortation to Ghanaians that: "As a people, we have had to make sacrifices. I wish to assure you that the results of these sacrifices would begin to show very soon" (See "U.S. Embassy Apologizes to Mahama Over 'Errant Tweet'" MyJoyOnline.com / Ghanaweb.com 7/19/14).
Somebody in the office of the U.S. Ambassador to Ghana is alleged to have tweeted back the kind of bone-rattling riposte that Ghanaian readers on tweeter ought to have promptly and massively volleyed at the rascally Bole-Bamboi chieftain. Dear Reader, take this reading: "And what sacrifices are you making? Don't tell me [about] that pay cut."
I also don't know that taxpayer sponges like Mr. Ras Mubarak (I forget his real name) have any right to fume about incontrovertible truths, such as reportedly shot into cyberspace from the official tweeter account of the resident chief diplomat of the United States. Well, the fact of the matter is that Mr. Mahama and his minions have made absolutely no significant material sacrifices for Moscow John to be griping about having been "diplomatically" affronted by President Obama's right-hand man in Accra.
And to be certain, I could not have been more incensed when President Mahama came up with his patently cosmetic 10-percent salary cut. I had expected that he would at least prevail on his cabinet appointees to start paying rents - not just partial utility bills - on their taxpayer-erected official mansions like everybody else. Instead, you had one tofu-brained Mahama lieutenant loudly patting himself on the back and screaming the way a man experiencing an uncontrollable bout of orgasm screams, to criminally stolid effect as follows: "Folks, see what epic and humongous sacrifices I am making towards our national development efforts. I pay my own light bills. Wow, Nana Tigare, I just can't believe this!"
Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of elementary and middle-school teachers and legions of civil service employees have been going to work every single weekday for some seven months, and counting, without a single paycheck. I have yet to hear of any cabinet appointee or parliamentarian complain about not having received his/her paycheck for even the past two weeks, let alone a month.
Admittedly, the account used to issue the rather auspicious and timely and well-deserved riposte to Mr. Mahama may have been a little out of place; and I am also quite certain that the tweeter riposte likely came from a very angry Ghanaian employee of the U.S. Embassy who might have momentarily forgotten all about the real ownership of his/her tweeter account.
What is significant and interesting about the reaction of the cynical apparatchiks of Ghana's ruling so-called National Democratic Congress (NDC), is the acute desperation reflected by such reaction. It well appears that party rodents and pit-bulls like Mr. Mubarak are hell-bent on reaping a maximum of diplomatic capital out of this proverbial hurricane in a soup pot.
Fortunately, Ghanaians, these days, have become far too sophisticated to be so cheaply taken for a ride. And Mr. Mahama would do himself and the rest of the nation great good by concentrating on the affairs of the people for which he was hired and is more than handsomely paid, than frivolously and propagandistically making a tweeter junkie out of himself.
Really, it is a wonder that President Mahama gets to tweet around the clock, with all the rampancy of the "dumsor" energy regime raging in the country. A word to the wise, Little Dramani....
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