Akufo-Addo is not a unigov czar, mind you!

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

E-mail: [email protected]

It is very pathetic that Metropolitan, Municipal and District Chief Executive Officers appointed by President John Dramani Mahama and, before the latter, President John Evans Atta-Mills, late, would be complaining bitterly because they had been issued letters relieving them of their posts (See “ ‘I Didn’t Err in Dismissal of MMDCEs’ – Alima Mahama Jabs” Modernghana.com 1/23/17).

Indeed, so comfortable and secure had these local government administrators become that they had failed to fathom the proverbial handwriting on the wall. The key National Democratic Congress’ operatives had mastered the art of poll-rigging so well that they had expected their chief patron and major benefactor to have handily won Election 2016 or be declared winner by hook-or-crook by the Chairperson of the so-called Independent Electoral Commission, Mrs. Charlotte Kesson-Smith Osei.

Which was why they felt traumatized and literally rooted to the spot, when on January 9, 2017, barely two days after President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo had been duly sworn in as President of the Republic of Ghana, they received dismissal letters from Ms. Alima Mahama, the Minister for Local Government and Rural Development-Designate.

They would vehemently challenge the legitimacy of the author of their dismissal letters, insisting, against all logic and common sense that as a Minister-Designate whose appointment had yet to be confirmed by the Parliamentary Appointments Committee (PAC), Ms. Mahama had yet to be conferred with the authority of the substantive Minister of Local Government and Rural Development.

It well appears that these National Democratic Congress’ appointees needed more time to do what they have been widely known to do with inimitable flair, loot whatever they could get their hands on and not get caught, hopefully.

As of this writing, for example, the Jubilee-Flagstaff House was reported to have been thoroughly ransacked and shorn of such taxpayer-purchased gadgets as television sets, refrigerators and furniture.

It is rather shameful how a people who rode to power on the mantra of “Probity, Transparency, Accountability and Justice,” not necessarily in the preceding order, almost overnight converted themselves into a Looting Brigade. During her appearance before the Parliamentary Appointments Committee, for example, Ms. Mahama noted what yours truly had already written about in a previous column on the same subject, to wit, that the inherent legitimacy of her dismissal letters to the Metropolitan, Municipal and District Chief Executive Officers stemmed from the fact of President Akufo-Addo’s having been duly sworn in as the substantive Leader of the Republic of Ghana.

What Ms. Mahama obviously and more poignantly and effectively did better than yours truly was that as legal expert, she had all the relevant articles and sections and sub-sections of the Constitution at her fingertips, which she suavely proceeded to rattle to PAC Chair Joe Osei-Wusu, and his associates, with inimitable finesse.

We must also promptly highlight the fact that the summary dismissal of the NDC-appointed MMDCEs was not done out of either sheer malice or vindictiveness. Rather, it was done purely out of a deep sense of the urgency of the humongous duty that lay ahead of the man who to patiently sweat it out for nearly a decade, while some key operatives of his own party fiercely fought against his destiny and the extant Electoral Commissioner, an old college roommate of his, colluded with his main political opponents to systematically frustrate his political ambitions.

At 72, the man does not have the luxury of the 50-something-year-old political opponent who was once dubiously conceded victory by a panel of Supreme Court jurists chaired by one of his “tribo-regional” homeboys. The latter would be handsomely rewarded by having a nephew or cousin of his named Executive-Secretary to the President. This time, though, the payola-prone former winner would not be twice lucky.

He would be handily defeated with an unprecedented electoral margin of difference. Well, like his MMDCE appointees, so traumatized did the latter’s chief patron become the day after the official announcement of his apocalyptic defeat, the story goes, that he stripped himself butt-naked and sprinted into the tall grassy bushes surrounding his Bole-Bamboi hometown. Today, Little Dramani, ironically forced into premature retirement, claims to be a farmer. But the fact of the matter is that the Achimota- and Legon-educated man has never held a hoe, let alone a machete or tractor.

He may not be a UNIGOV Czar but make no mistake, President Akufo-Addo fully appreciates the fact that democracy is about anything but a winner-takes-all sweepstakes.

Come December 2018, that is barely two years from now, the posts of Metropolitan, Municipal and District Chief Executives would be open to all who deem themselves to be qualified to compete for the same. You see, this laudable exhibition of political enlightenment is indubitably what differentiates President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo from all these other pack of narcissistic hoodlums.

*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs