Opinions of Thursday, 17 December 2015
Columnist: Okoampa-Ahoofe, Kwame
By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Dec. 12, 2015
E-mail: [email protected]
The Communications Minister may either be hallucinating or Dr. Edward Omane-Boamah, the notorious scofflaw, is definitely in the wrong portfolio. Not that the inexcusably pathetic performance of his boss is any remarkably better. Not very long ago, I solemnly advised President Mahama to do both Dr. Omane-Boamah and the rest of us a favor by posting the professionally trained medical doctor to one of the backwater districts of the Okwawu Scarp in order to allow the young man to more effectively ply his trade. For other than his obnoxiously big mouth, and I mean it both figuratively and literally speaking, Dr. Omane-Boamah does not seem to have much to say that is either forward-looking or very meaningful.
In his latest salvo, the Communications Minister has the chutzpah to accuse the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) of being riddled with mediocre leadership (See “NDC Will Win 2016 By 1 Million Votes If… - Omane-Boamah” Classfmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 12/12/15). He could have done far better to have given us an update on the government’s record, so far, in reducing the criminally unsanitary condition of open defecation on the beaches and in the gutters of our nation’s capital. I would not even bother to touch on the characteristically childish back-and-forth raging between the Okwawu-’Bomeng native and Dr. Kwabena Donkor, the snake-oil peddling Power Minister, over whether, indeed, the Mahama-led government of the National Democratic Congress can effectively stanch the economically crippling incidence of “Dumsor,” or erratic power supply, by the end of this or the next week.
And would Dr. Omane-Boamah dare to disagree with yours truly that it constitutes the height of administrative incompetence for President Mahama to have responded to the problem of Dumsor with the creation of a “boondogglish” Ministry of Power, in addition to an already existent Ministry of Energy? What kind of madness is this, by the way? I mean, what have Ghanaians gained from this knee-jerk ministerial elevation of Dr. Donkor but another scandalous opportunity for Mr. Mahama to play Santa Claus – or Father Christmas – to another hopelessly incompetent hanger-on? Indeed, what differentiates the perennially bumbling Mahama-led National Democratic Congress from the Akufo-Addo-led New Patriotic Party (NPP), is the poignant recognition of the need to promptly sack grossly ill-performing party administrators like Messrs. Paul Afoko, Kwabena Agyepong and Sammy Crabbe, National Chairman, General-Secretary and Second-Vice Chairman, respectively.
And precisely why are key NDC operatives from President Mahama, General-Secretary Johnson Asiedu-Nketia (aka General Mosquito) and Dr. Omane-Boamah, among a legion of others, so disconsolately aggrieved by the all-too-salutary removal of these rascally party-headquarters operatives who clearly appeared to be running the affairs of the country’s most progressive political party from the playbook of the Flagstaff House’s Abongo Boys? And yes, Dr. Omane-Boamah is quite accurate in recognizing the fact that it was the Atuguba-presided Supreme Court panel that counted and gifted Mr. Mahama the 300,000 votes that the Communications Minister claims the NDC to have clinched in excess of those purported to have been garnered by Nana Akufo-Addo in December 2012.
And on the latter score ought to be significantly noted that back then Mr. Asiedu-Nketia, the shamelessly cross-dressing NDC scribe, publicly and categorically told the host of an Accra-based radio program that it was actually Nana Akufo-Addo who had convincingly won the 2012 presidential election, but that it was an abject lack of vigilance on the part of NPP polling agents and observers that had thrown the electoral dice falsely in favor of then-Transitional President John Dramani Mahama. Indeed, Dr. Omane-Boamah and his ilk will be in for a rude awakening, if they keep smugly and obscenely entertaining the idea that, somehow, Ghanaian voters are too stupid and self-hating to look towards their own best interest in the lead-up to Election 2016.
The NDC leadership must also be sternly forewarned that any dastardly attempt to pack our Biometric Voters’ Register (BVR) with foreign nationals, both resident in the country and abroad, will be fiercely contested. This time around, though, such contest will likely be on the battlefield than in the courtroom of any NDC-rented jurist. Dr. Omane-Boamah also needs to look Ghanaians straight in the eyes and tell us why, if President Mahama were such a competent and formidable leader, the entire NDC party leadership, at both the Flagstaff House and at party headquarters, colluded to have Mr. George Boateng, the 45-year-old Oyarifa Constituency Youth Organizer, bumped off the presidential primary ballot. The fact of the matter is that President Mahama and his lackeys and minions are scared stiff of Messrs. Akufo-Addo and Bawumia, now that their secret Biometric Voters’ Register-rigging has been objectively and forensically sustainably exposed.