Mahama Yahaya, it was Danquah who groomed Nkrumah

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

There is an article circulating on Ghanaweb.com, as well as other Ghanaian media websites, captioned “Bawumia’s Father Betrayed Mahama – Veteran CPP Member” (9/21/16).

The gist of the article is that, somehow, the distinguished and highly respected father of Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, Alhaji Mumuni Bawumia, the former Chief Executive Officer of the erstwhile Cocoa-Marketing Board (CMB), presently renamed COCOBOD, for whatever such renaming may be worth, betrayed an otherwise progressive and dynamic Mr. E. A. Mahama, the father of President John Dramani Mahama.

Interestingly, however, if you take the time, as a reader, to critically analyze and digest the contents of this brief article, what it thematically points to is the unmistakable fact that, indeed, the elder Mr. Mahama, the first northerner to be named to the post of Northern Regional Commissioner, was so pathologically tribalistic/ethnocentric that he could not see beyond the specific needs, interests and aspirations of his own tribesmen and women, the Gonjas.

Mr. Mahama Yahaya, described as the Yipalawura and a sub-chief of the Bole Traditional Area, is a relative of a late paramount chief of the Gonja people, otherwise known as the Yagbonwura of Gonja.

It is a pity that Alhaji Mumuni Bawumia, who authored his own autobiography prior to his death not too long ago, and who was also known as the first northern-descended Ghanaian college-educated teacher, is not around to answer these clearly jaundiced, fanatically partisan and ethnically chauvinist and neo-fascist charges leveled against him by the Mahama clansman, who clearly aims to scuttle the presidential ambitions of the deceased man’s son, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia.

For starters, the rather vacuous, to speak much less about the patently vicious, accusation that Alhaji Mumuni Bawumia betrayed Mr. E. A. Mahama falls flat in the face of both the evidence and logic provided by Mr. Mahama Yahaya.

But even more poignantly ought to be observed the fact that the so-called Founding-Father of Modern Ghana, President Kwame Nkrumah, was the first and greatest traitor whose breakaway political party, the Convention People’s Party, so-called, also betrayed the trust and aspirations of the Ghanaian people. Nkrumah’s betrayal of Dr. J. B. Danquah, the man who groomed him on the national political scene, is without compare and has been canonically etched in the history books; it is therefore unnecessary for me to rehash the same here.

It is also quite clear that the 90-year-old Mr. Mahama Yahaya has a predictably difficult time coming to terms with the fact that, in fact, it was Dr. Danquah, and not Mr. Kwame Nkrumah, who groomed both the elder Mr. Bawumia and the elder Mr. Mahama, with Danquah’s co-founding of the first serious political movement in the country, to wit, the United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC), and not the Convention People’s Party (CPP), which, like the United Party (UP), emerged out of the dying embers and ashes of the UGCC.

Nkrumah, himself, is on record to have attested to the incontrovertible fact that it was the UGCC that introduced him into the mainstream of modern Ghanaian political culture.

In the main, the Yipalawura, Mahama Yahaya, has little to say that is genuinely and/or legitimately condemnatory or accusatory of Alhaji Mumuni Bawumia, other than the quite justifiable fact that President Nkrumah had removed the elder Mr. Mahama from his post as Northern Regional Commissioner and replaced the latter with Alhaji Mumuni Bawumia.

The Mahama clansman does not provide his audience or readers with any substantive evidence clearly proving that, indeed, Mr. E. A. Mahama’s Mamprusi political rival had caused the removal of President Mahama’s father as the first northern-born Commissioner of the Northern Region.

In reality, and perhaps inadvertently, Mr. Mahama Yahaya says more that unmistakably and indisputably indicts Mr. E. A. Mahama as a dyed-in-the-wool tribal bigot who only saw the development of the Northern Region, then including the present-day Upper-East and Upper-West regions, in terms of projects underwritten by the Ghanaian taxpayer and our collective national resources being exclusively directed to the homeland of his own Gonja kinsmen and women.

In the end, what Mr. Mahama Yahaya succeeds in doing is to significantly, albeit clearly unintentionally, offer Ghanaians an instructive insight into the genetic provenance, or roots, of the much remarked pathological corruption and gross incompetence of President John Dramani Mahama. Indeed, whoever first observed that “Those who live in straw huts must not play with fire” was indisputably a wise man or wise woman, for that matter.