Now what, Asiedu-Nketia?

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

They were as arrogantly assured of themselves as day and night; so when the condignly deposed movers and shakers of the soon-to-be the main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) mounted a behemoth rally at the Accra Sports Stadium with less than 72 hours to go before Election 2016, it was simply to take turns preening themselves and virulently lambasting their most formidable political opponents, namely, then-Candidate Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo and his running-mate, the Oxbridge-educated and crackerjack economic maven, Alhaji Mahamudu Bawumia. For the General-Secretary of the National Democratic Congress, Mr. Johnson Asiedu-Nketia, Messrs. Akufo-Addo and Bawumia had made it honorable for the party’s Kingpin, President John Dramani Mahama to be described as “administratively incompetent” (See “Call Me Incompetent General-Secretary – Asiedu-Nketia” 3News.com / Ghanaweb.com 12/6/16).

The former NDC-Member of Parliament from Seikwa, in the Brong-Ahafo Region, waxed pontifical and eloquent in the country’s Akan-majority language of Twi to the effect that the New Patriotic Party’s presidential candidate and his running-mate were merely hallucinating when they called Little Dramani incompetent, because the phenomenal achievements of the former Rawlings Communications Minister were so dazzling that they were to blame for having caused Messrs. Akufo-Addo and Bawumia to read their adjectives backwards, like students who had been severely afflicted with dyslexia. General Mosquito, as Mr. Asiedu-Nketia is popularly known, then went on to invite his party’s two arch-nemeses to also call him “an incompetent NDC General-Secretary,” because conferring him with such epithet was like being honored by the Swedish Academy with the Nobel Prize for Economics.

Actually, The Mosquito did not use the same words as the foregoing; he had simply implied it. But what got the proverbial goat of yours truly’s was when The Mosquito facilely presumed to have exclusive knowledge of the intentions of the overwhelming majority of the Ghanaian electorate.

Ghanaian voters, The Mosquito asserted, were decidedly of one accord. And that accord was to definitively ensure that they kick-boxed the giant elephant into the bush, come Wednesday, December 7, and make sure that the giant elephant had gotten so cranially addled as to never be able to find its way back into town. All too predictably, The Mosquito added that other than Messrs. Akufo-Addo and Bawumia, the overwhelming majority of Ghanaians intended to vote to retain President Mahama to ensure that nearly every town and village in the country, with the logical exception of the Galamsey Capital, was afforded the same sort of “travel-and-see” flyover that converted the Kwame Nkrumah Circle area of our nation’s capital into Dubai.

The Mosquito said all this on Monday, December 5. By Tuesday, December 6, he had pinched himself of whatever remained that could be aptly characterized as human flesh to assure himself of the impending apocalyptic doom of the elephant. He even claimed to be hearing the rattling of the throat of the giant pachyderm, whose long and labored breaths, he was quite certain, had long petered out.

And then on Wednesday, when it became garishly clear that it was rather the umbrella that had been effectively banished from the palace, The Mosquito insisted against all odds and common sense that it was only the umbrella which in their mad rush to voting for Little Dramani to “Toaso” with his “Dubaian” wonders, the electors had left in the vestibules of their homes. A meticulous recount of the Konadu-minted bald-eagle tips of the umbrellas on the august floor of the House, was certain to restore everything to normalcy.

“We shall govern with a parliamentary minority at all costs,” a visibly shaken Mosquito was to be heard screaming in the boob-tube from a place whose backdrop well appeared to be a ravine or at least a deep and dark echo-chamber of regret. “Little Dramani is still far head of the hoodlum pack. And that pack, of course, includes the Giant Dwarf from the Galamsey Capital.”