A failed Mahama cannot teach Akufo-Addo a better education policy initiative

You see, the real problem with former President John Dramani Mahama is that the man woefully lacks the cognitive and intellectual puissance of an Akufo-Addo to fully appreciate the fact that you simply cannot facilely and mendaciously presume to be capable of shaping up a policy initiative whose practical implementation you have been pooh-poohing for over a decade, as one that was a downright impossibility.

So maybe the most logical question to ask our former President, following his most recent lecture at the University of Cape Coast, last Thursday, April 11, in which he pathetically presumed to have the flair or competence “to assess the state of education in Ghana today,” when you have the worst record of any postcolonial Ghanaian leader on precisely this crucial aspect of our national life (See “Mahama Hints at Changes to Free SHS within First 3 Months of Next Presidency” 3News.com 4/12/19) is tersely as follows: How dare you presume to so cavalierly insult the intelligence of the Ghanaian people?

We must also quickly point out that in terms of credibility and integrity, the man who callously robbed Ghanaians of our free-speech right to criticize our presidents in the leadup to the 2016 presidential election is a brazen and impudent liar of the most scandalous order. He would also accuse the then recently deceased President John Evans Atta-Mills of having ignobly made him a “Presidential Spare-Tire.”

Interestingly, while campaigning during the last electoral season, Mr. Mahama also publicly promised that he intended to within a short span of time retrieve Mr. Alfred Agbesi Woyome’s GH? 51.2 Milling creaming of the Ghanaian taxpayer. By the close of his four-and-half-year tenure on January 7, 2017, or thereabouts, the Mahama-led government of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) had collected zilch. Nil. Nada, as Spanish-speaking New Yorkers are wont to say. Indeed, whatever monies have been successfully retrieved from the Chief NDC Underwriter, as of this writing, were retrieved by President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo through his uncompromisable Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, to wit, Ms. Gloria Akufo.

Here again, we are prompted to revisit the old Akan maxim, to wit, “If Mr./Ms. Naked promises you a bolt of cotton-print, you just have to listen to his/her name.” The proverbial Emperor is stark naked, but he is much too drunk with his own vacuous sense of self-importance to espy the same.

Well, the good news for this pathological liar and narcissist is that he also happens to be surrounded by a crowd of even far more morally naked minions, all of whom are standing sedulously attentively and wide awake like hungry lions, hoping that Ali Baba shall soon regain access to the Jubilee-Flagstaff House to enable his Forty-Thieves to pounce onto whatever may be left therein, including their own personal pelf, hurriedly left behind in some hidden vaults, somewhere in the basement of that Indian-sponsored palace, when the massive electoral fire that torched the mansion fashioned after King Osei-Tutu’s Golden Stool forced them to instantaneously evacuate. Of course, it would have been much too dangerous to squirrel such pelf out, in the full-glare of digitized camera shutters clicking by the nanosecond.

The grim reality here is that the Second-Coming of Comrade Ali Baba may never come to pass in either the present life or the one shortly hereafter. You see, it is rather insufferably absurd for anybody to talk about a purported “major challenges” in the context of an at once incongruous and unprecedently progressive and visionary education policy initiative, when one had not even attempted to touch the same with the proverbial forty-foot pole when Comrade Ali Baba had the unusually protracted prime opportunity to do so.

I mean, just where does one begin to edit a linguistically convoluted cipher, when one does not even know how to read? But, of course, as that tired maxim goes, “Those goofballs deserve one another.” I am here, of course, referring to the Mahama-salaaming marionettes like the one who was widely reported to have hosted this most farcical of the Mahama campaign roadshows.

We hear that this clinically inebriated presumptuous narcissist kept punctuating his UCC lecture with the prepositional phrase of “When I become President of this country again…,” and then in a sort of wistfully desperate afterthought, he grotesquely feigned studious humility and added rather comically, “Or let me just say by the Grace of God.” I could simply not help but literally topple off my chair.

You see, Dear Reader, it was because the last time that we heard the “Ganja Boy” mention the name of Divine Providence, it was to vulgarly and barbarically thank God for having so opportunely heaved his former boss out of the way in order to make way for a new generation of “Boot-for-Boot” political scam-artists.

And then last time when we heard from this Jerry-Boom-Lookalike, it was to sternly caution nobodies like us to shut the frig up because our one and only use in our beloved Ghana was to simply and thoughtlessly furnish Comrade Ali Baba with a presidential meal ticket every leap year.

“How dare you presume criticize me?! When did you ever get elected to sit and gorge yourselves with Burkina-imported-guinea fowl-stew and rice-and-beans and then liberally fart yourselves silly on Antubam’s Chair?” Ali Baba was widely quoted by the media recently.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York