Listen to Haruna "The Plagiarist" Iddrisu

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

If I am not mistaken, I first heard about the name of Ghana's current Trade and Industry Minister, Mr. Haruna Iddrisu, in connection with a largely plagiarized graduate (M. Phil.) thesis at the University of Ghana sometime in 2009. Back then, he must have been a deputy cabinet appointee or in some such executive capacity. His degree must have been withdrawn by the Academic Council of the country's flagship academy.

And so it is quite intriguing to hear Mr. Iddrisu gratuitously and self-righteously castigate the leaders of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) for resoundingly boycotting the National Democratic Congress-sponsored National Economic Forum (NEF) - (See "NPP Bereft of Ideas; Do Not Have Superior Ideas to Fix Economy - Haruna Iddrisu" MyJoyOnline.com / Ghanaweb.com 5/13/14).

I had earlier on erroneously assumed that the NEF was only a daylong confab. I have just learned that it spans a four-day period, though as of this preparation for the press, the Senchi Charade, as it has become comedically known, had just ended on its third day, apparently as a result of the massive boycott by the major NPP players. The four-day schedule was temporally reasonable for an event of such theoretically momentous proportions, if also because, as already adumbrated, forums of the Senchi sort, sponsored by the Mahama regime, tend to be too superficial to engender any meaningful policy strategies (See my article titled "Osafo-Maafo Should Not Attend the NEF" or "National Economic Hot-Air," on the various Ghanaian media websites).

But that the summary and massive boycott of the NEF should occasion the patently infantile fury of Mr. Iddrisu, the Trade and Industry Minister, is all the more to be pitied. This is simply because the National Democratic Congress was not voted into power to organize National Economic Forums, in order to seek creative and innovative ideas from its political opponents vis-a-vis the most constructive ways of managing a fast-unravelling macro-economy.

Rather, the Mahama-led National Democratic Congress was voted into power because it pontifically claimed to be invested with something called "A Better Ghana Agenda." And so it is inexcusably insulting for fraudulent NDC leaders like Mr. Iddrisu to accuse their NPP counterparts of cynically seeking to stall the economic development of the country, merely because the key operatives of the main opposition New Patriotic Party legitimately refuse to usurp the mandate of the Ghanaian people, as clearly determined by Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan, the Electoral Commissioner, and President John Dramani Mahama, with the peremptory judicial backing of the Atuguba-presided Supreme Court panel that delivered its drawn-out decision on the Election 2012 impasse at the end of August last year.

Mr. Iddrisu desperately claims that the leaders of the New Patriotic Party are definitely "bereft of any constructive ideas" for the growth and development of our national economy, and ought to be boldly made aware of the fact that "they do not have any superior ideas vis-a-vis the fixing of the economy." What is significant to note here is the pleasantly surprising fact that the Mahama government's operatives would now be publicly acknowledging the fact that they have effectively run the economic ship of the Ghanaian state aground.

In essence, it clearly appears that the National Economic Forum is the NDC's way of issuing an S-O-S or a bailout signal to the key members of the New Patriotic Party. In a robust parliamentary democracy such as Britain's, Ghanaians would have been preparing to vote in a new government, with "Prime Minister" Mahama and his cabinet tendering their resignation with profuse apologies.

Unfortunately, ours is not a robust and transparent democratic culture. And so we are, all of us, doomed to enduring another two long years of gross political and administrative incompetence, the likes of which Ghanaians patiently - and some say "timidly" - endured under Mr. Rawlings' much-hated culture of silence between 1981 and 2000. And so when Mr. Rawlings calls for a revolution, it is not clear what kind of administrative destination he has in mind. We, however, know one thing - and it is the fact that Mr. Rawlings is as responsible for the current socioeconomic crisis plaguing the country as is President Mahama.

As my maternal grandmother was fond of reminding parents of unruly children, including her own adult-children, "A crab does not beget a bird." As of whether an academic plagiarist like Mr. Haruna Iddrisu has the moral credibility to impugn the integrity and patriotism of his political opponents, for justifiably refusing to march to the drum-beat of NDC's "New China Song," a la General Mosquito, is another species of quadruped altogether.

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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
Board Member, The Nassau Review
May 14, 2014
E-mail: [email protected]
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