It is an unquestionable reflection of the questionable character of a leader who has absolutely no remarkable sense of decorum, for President John Dramani Mahama to hold a rally in Suhum, where I briefly schooled while growing up in the 1960s, and the courtyard of Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, the presidential candidate of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), and outrageously accuse Ghana’s former Attorney-General and Minister of Justice of being so pathologically inclined towards dictatorial tendencies that should he be elected President of Ghana, Nana Akufo-Addo would likely destool chiefs who criticize his job performance and policies.
Maybe the “Ganger Boy” needs to carefully look at the man in the mirror, vis-à-vis his unquestionably egregious treatment of chiefs and people of areas and municipalities and districts of the country widely known to ideologically tilt towards the New Patriotic Party. For it is quite obvious that either the current President of our Republic is abjectly ignorant of the 1992 Republican Constitution and the fundamental laws of the land, as Nana Akufo-Addo critically observes, or Mr. Mahama has conveniently forgotten the neocolonialist Nkrumaist tradition from whence he hails, and which he fanatically and unconscionably celebrates annually as his model of democratic governance.
Needless to say, rather than deviously seek to revise the real postcolonial history of Ghana, most especially the history pertaining to the turbulent era of the Nkrumah-led Convention People’s Party (CPP) that regressively caused the near-thorough destruction of the chieftaincy establishment and, by logical extension, Akan Culture in particular, the Gonja petty chieftain ought to take stock of the inexcusable depravity of the Nkrumah regime, of which his own father, Mr. Emmanuel Adama Mahama (or some such name), was a key player and thoroughly rethink his scandalous attitude towards Ghanaian culture and our national development at large.
Needless to say, it reeks of nothing short of blasphemy for a leader who only recently warned Ghanaians against making any negative remarks about his lackluster performance as the country’s chief administrator, on the inescapably imperious grounds that the very people who elected him had absolutely no presidential or governance experience to qualify them to presume to evaluate the same, to so intemperately accuse his main political opponent of being afflicted with dictatorial tendencies. And on the latter score, it is also significant to recall the fact that this is not the very first or second time that the Bole-Bamboi native has stood on Akan soils to rain insults and abuse on both legitimately invested Akan traditional rulers and their subjects who, incontrovertibly, constitute the single most important ethnic and cultural unit of the Ghanaian populace and electorate.
For instance, not long ago, President Mahama stood in the most significant Akan royal capital of Kumasi and cavalierly insulted the intelligence and collective sub-national character of ethnic Asantes. Back then, Mr. Mahama also presumptuously claimed that so flagrantly ungrateful were Asantes that even if he were to pave all the streets and highways of the country’s most populous region with gold, Asantes would still not reciprocate such a magnanimous gesture by voting overwhelmingly to retain his National Democratic Congress (NDC) regime in office. Then Mr. Mahama also stood in front of His Royal Majesty, The Okyenhene, Osagyefo Amoatia Ofori-Panyin, II, and callously taunted the indigenes and residents of Kyebi, the traditional capital of Okyeman, for being the headquarters of the criminally predatory and NDC-sponsored wantonly destructive activities of Galamsey, or illegal mining.
Not surprisingly, this National Democratic Congress’ government has yet to design and implement any comprehensive program aimed at reversing the Akan or non-northern equivalent of desertification. Where is our SADA? Indeed, even as Ms. Otiko Djaba, the National Women’s Organizer of the New Patriotic Party and cousin of President Mahama, recently observed, Little Dramani is so clinically, and/or innately, bereft of any remarkable modicum of conscience that he simply cannot help inexorably and incessantly creating confusion and mayhem all over the land. Which is why it was very refreshing to hear Nana Akufo-Addo charitably enlighten his main political opponent about the indisputable fact that it was his own father, the Oxbridge-educated then-Chief Justice of Ghana, Mr. Edward Akufo-Addo, a man who suffered the brunt of Nkrumah’s globally notorious dictatorial tendencies, who personally oversaw the glorious institutionalization of the constitutional inviolability of chieftaincy in the country. Will Mr. Mahama call Nana Akufo-Addo arrogant for bluntly and fearlessly telling the truth?
It is also quite clear that President Mahama, a much-touted historian, knows little to absolutely nothing about the canonical history of chieftaincy in postcolonial Ghana. If he did, the “Ganger Boy” would have readily recognized Nana Akufo-Addo as a bona fide member of a family whose patriarchs suffered Nkrumah’s execrable degradation of the chieftaincy establishment more than any other reputable major Ghanaian royal family.
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