Please, Mr. Mahama, Don't See Beyond 2016!

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D. Garden City, New York Oct. 29, 2014 E-mail: [email protected]

He says he cannot repair the badly damaged Ghanaian economy in two years; and that he desperately needs to remain in power beyond Election 2016 (See "We Can't Fix Economy in 2yrs; My Eye is Beyond 2016" Ghanaweb.com 10/27/14). Is this a thinly veiled threat and/or rhetorical code clearly indicating that President John Dramani Mahama intends to stay smack-dab at the Flagstaff House by hook or crook come January 2017?

Well, that much is not very difficult to figure out. The man still has yet to credibly and convincingly reveal to the baited-breathed Ghanaian voting public, precisely what events led to the abrupt and shocking demise of his former boss, President John Evans Atta-Mills. (We all know that President Atta-Mills was terminally ill, contrary to deviously expedient and spirited official attempts to conceal the same; we also know that his doctors had predicted, based on their quite reliable clinical findings, that the man was likely to live a little beyond the end of 2012).

As well, what really precipitated the sudden move by Mr. Mahama and his staff from the Osu Castle to the Flagstaff, almost immediately after the mysterious demise of President Atta-Mills? This, after vehemently insisting, together with his late boss, that the Kufuor-reconstructed Flagstaff House was more fitting for housing poultry stock than for human habitation. Was it a classical MacBethian Case of being harried and haunted by the ghost of the man that a significant percentage of Ghanaians firmly he, Mr. Mahama, had expediently, and conveniently, shoved out of the way?

At any rate, Mr. Mahama has been integral to the calculated and steady destruction of the Ghanaian economy since January 2009, when he and then-President-Elect Atta-Mills took over the democratic reins of governance from President John Agyekum-Kufuor. And so, really, Mr. Mahama cannot in absolutely anyway attempt to hoodwink Ghanaians into believing that, somehow, he has either the will or the flair, or even the desire to remarkably cause the salutary revival of our gravely ill national economy anytime soon.

The stark fact of the matter is that even were he to be afforded the electoral mandate of the Ghanaian people for a decade, instead of just another four years, President Mahama would still not be able to bring the country's economy to the quite promising level bequeathed him and his now-late boss and predecessor in January 2009 by President Agyekum-Kufuor. In the barely four months leading to Election 2012, the then-transitional President Mahama wastefully spent the people's money more wantonly than had been the case in the preceding seven months.

In other words, his apparently desperate desire to stay on at the Flagstaff House beyond 2016 has far more to do with sheer megalomania, and more profligate and flagrant spending of the people's money, than any epiphanic need to retsoring the Ghanaian economy to an acceptable level as his legacy to the people whom he so pontifically claims to have generously afforded him their electoral mandate in 2008.

Maybe Mr. Mahama also needs to be plainly and frontally alerted to the fact that the ongoing negotiations between his government and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), vis-a-vis having the latter Bretton Wood institution bail out the effectively wrecked Ghanaian economy, has far more to do with the mouth-watering itch, on the part of the former Rawlings Communications Minister, to hosting a sumptuously scandalous feast of wanton pillaging of our national economy with his grubby and clinically unconscionable cronies and associates of the so-called National Democratic Congress (NDC).

The latter political juggernaut, needless to say, has absolutely no enviable record of remarkably revamping the presently morbidly tenterhooked Ghanaian economy.

President Mahama also needs to officially publish precisely how much of the people's money he and his cronies and associates spent in getting themselves retained in the seat of governance beyond Election 2012. This call has become imperative, in view of vehement demand by distinguished Ghanaians citizens, including Justice Emile Short, the former Commissioner for the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ), for all competing political parties to have their electioneering campaigns publicly underwritten.

Justice Short, it is significant to observe, predicates his demand solely on the fact of a routine protocol of governments in power having made the unfettered spending of the people's money a legitimate statutory act. Indeed, if I had the say-so, I would promptly and unreservedly admonish the IMF President and his associates and staff to hold off on the release of any bailout funds for the Government of Ghana, until January 2017. For it can hardly be gainsaid that the proposed IMF bailout is inescapably about keeping afloat a conspicuously cash-starveled 2016 Mahama-for-President electioneering campaign.

Ghanaians, it is equally significant to note, have recently been reluctant witnesses to the 2014 Brazil World Cup epic fraud cavalierly presided over by Mr. Elvis Afriyie-Ankrah, the former Youth and Sports Minister, and the man who also managed the 2012 Mahama Presidential Campaign.

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