Show us the factories, Spio!

He has absolutely no credibility whatsoever, so I did not even bother to read beyond the farcical headline when I first came across the news article captioned “NDC Built Over 1,000 Factories Under Mahama – Spio-Garbrah” ( 3News.com / Ghanaweb.com 1/7/20). This stupid lying game has begun, once again, I huffed under my breath.

This is why I have absolutely no respect for National Democratic Congress’ leaders like Candidate John Dramani Mahama and the rest of the horde of hoodlums and political scam-artists that constitute the movers-and-shakers of this Rawlings-fangled juggernaut. You see, political scumbags like Ekwow Spio-Garbrah appear to outrageously think and believe that the average eligible Ghanaian voter has the memory and cranial capacity of a coccidia-afflicted chicken, cat or dog.

If, indeed, as Mr. Spio-Garbrah so haughtily and mendaciously claims, 1,000 factories were built and put into full-operation during the four-and-half-year tenure of then-President John Dramani Mahama, then what the shameless Atta-Mills detractor ought to have done should have been for him to publish a list of those 1,000 factories and then tell Ghanaians where in Ghana these factories were built, and also how many adult Ghanaian citizens each of these factories hired or employed and at what ranges of wages and salaries.

Instead, predictably, we have the former Mahama-appointed Trade and Industry Minister telling Ghanaians some cock-and-bull stories about the sort of state-owned financial agencies and institutions from which monies were borrowed to build these chimerical – or purely imaginary – factories.

The power-hungry Mr. Spio-Garbrah must either be living in a Fools’ Paradise or he may very well be suffering from acute dementia. You see, Dear Reader, this is a man who, not very long ago, while mischievously scheming for the Presidential Nomination of the National Democratic Congress, lied to the nation that he had once been named by the late President John Evans Atta-Mills as the latter’s favorite minister.

This was, by the way, the same backbiting and mudslinging political rottweiler who constantly kept telling his political patron and mentor, namely, Chairman Jerry John Rawlings, that the latter’s handpicked Swedru-declared dynastic Presidential Candidate of the National Democratic Congress was “damaged goods” who could not be counted upon to govern the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana with any appreciable degree of efficiency and/or effectiveness.

Back then, as yours truly vividly recalls, in the frenzied leadup to the election of the NDC’s Presidential Candidate for the 2020 Presidential Election, I also asked this scheming megalomaniacal SOB, in turn, whether the late President Mills had been Mr. Spio-Garbrah’s favorite president. Well, to this day, like the man whose unenviable running-mate Spio clearly appears to be feverishly scheming for and the unexplained circumstances under which then-President Atta-Mills met his death, Mr. Spio-Garbrah has yet to offer the Ghanaian electorate any intelligent and/or meaningful answer.

But that he is reported to have dished out his latest lie of the century during the recent commemorative celebration of the judicially proscribed so-called 31st December Revolution, ought to tell any patriotic Ghanaian citizen and eligible voter that Mr. Spio-Garbrah and Candidate Dramani Mahama, the former’s sometime ministerial deputy at the Communications Ministry, are veritable criminal scofflaws who do not deserve to be afforded a second look and a second chance at the Presidency.

It is also downright farcical for the former Secretary-General of the Commonwealth Telecommunications Organization to tell Ghanaians that about the only thing that the leaders of the Akufo-Addo-led New Patriotic Party (NPP) are known to do better than the key operatives of the National Democratic Congress, is the “branding” or hyping up of their relatively much fewer development projects. I bet Mr. Spio-Garbrah never heard of the School-Feeding Program, the fee-free Senior High School Policy Initiative, the Capitation Grant, the progressive and salutary resuscitation of the Mahama-bankrupted Agyekum-Kufuor-established National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) and the effectively Rawlings-collapsed Ghana National Industrial Holdings Corporation (GIHOC). Yes, that is what they precisely mean when reprobate political scam-artists like Messrs. Spio-Garbrah and Dramani Mahama talk about the NDC’s having built over 1,000 Dumsor-regulated factories during the four-and-half year protracted and nightmarish tenure of Little Dramani. Happy New Year, Dear Reader!

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

E-mail: [email protected]

*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs