Payback Time, Mr. Mahama!

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

A March 2, 2013 story carried in the General News section of Ghanaweb.com, sourced to Citifmonline.com and captioned “Togo, Benin Request Power from Ghana Amidst Blackouts” gave the proverbial lie to recent seemingly capricious, albeit curiously vigorous, overtures made by President Thomas Yayi Boni of Benin, who also doubles as president of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), to get Nana Akufo-Addo to abandon his Supreme Court petition seeking to overturn the declaration of President John Dramani Mahama as the winner of last December's presidential election by Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan, chairman of the country's Electoral Commission (EC).

The aforesaid story had the Energy Minister of Benin, Mr. Bathelemy D. Kassa, and three other compatriots, including Benin's Ambassador to Ghana, Mr. Assounan Noultouoi, desperately pleading with Ghana's Energy Minister, Mr. Emmanuel Armah-Kofi Buah, to appreciably increase power supply to the two neighboring countries. Glaringly absent were the names of the delegation members from Togo, Ghana's immediate eastern neighbor, whose presence had been clearly hinted by the reporter of the story. And it was, indeed, the latter detail that most piqued my interest and attention. For in recent times, Togolese authorities have generously played host to spillover refugees resulting from periodic inter-ethnic clashes near the northeastern boundary between the two countries.

Conversely, it is also significant to highlight the fact that in recent weeks nearly two-hundred Ghanaian nationals reportedly resident in Benin have been deported back to their country of origin. It, therefore, appears to me, personally, that if an already energy-starved Ghana would be looking towards remarkably stepping up power supply to any of our two neighboring countries, a higher priority ought to be accorded our Togolese brothers and sisters. I am only objectively herein applying the age-old principles of Utilitarianism.

But, of course, the judgment call here is none of my own. And it clearly appears that President Yayi Boni's rather peevish attempts to force Mr. Mahama down the throats of Ghanaian citizens appears to be working modest miracles. For Mr. Armah-Kofi Buah, Ghana's Energy Minister, reportedly “encouraged his [Benin] counterpart to negotiate with the Ivorian authorities for additional power,” while Ghana got “ready to wheel [in] such extra power at no cost from now till the end of April 2013.”

At the latter report, naturally, I began to wonder whether any such relief had been put in place by Ghana's Energy Minister in order to ensure that Ghanaian citizens and entrepreneurs, equally suffering from drastic energy shortfalls in recent months, would be taken good care of as they imperatively ought to. If not, and I have absolutely no reason to believe otherwise, then what we are clearly witnessing here may be aptly and euphemistically characterized as “Diplomatic Payola.”

We must also hasten to add that Cote d'Ivoire's President Alassane Dramane Ouattara has equally been complicit in the cronyistic attempt to ride roughshod over the country's Constitution and electoral protocol by foisting the embattled Ghanaian leader on the overwhelming majority of Ghanaian voters who did not proffer him their mandate in the dubious name of ECOWAS solidarity. In sum, Ghanaians ought to studiously tread cautiously, lest the veritable albatross that I eerily perceive to be ECOWAS does not end up thwarting the economic development of our country. We need to conduct ourselves more shrewdly than we, as a nation, have been doing thus far; for we have traveled this path before and are still suffering the deleterious effects of the same. That was what “Nkrumaism” was unmistakably about.

Needless to say, it makes for good neighborliness to reach out to the less fortunate ones in the ECOWAS 'HOOD from time to time, such as Ghana, Nigeria, Chad and several other countries in the “hood” are doing in Mali, where Tuareg Islamists have been recklessly and crudely attempting to impose Sharia Law on an otherwise moderate Islamic nation. What we clearly see here is the classically bizarre horse-rider relationship typical of the recent colonial African past. President Yayi Boni seems to be playing rider here; but who is the horse here, though?

PS: Anyway, at the time of putting the final touches to this article for publication, it had just been reported that Ghana had turned down the Benin-Togo request for power upgrade. We hope the Mahama government means what the report claims.

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

Department of English

Nassau Community College of SUNY

Garden City, New York

March 2, 2012