Was Mahama’s Residential Request Legal and Intelligent?

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
January 14, 2017
E-mail: [email protected]

They knew perfectly well that the request they were making of the newly elected President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo was one that could not be granted, because it violated the Presidential Transition Act. It clearly violated Section 10, Subsection 1 of the Act. And yet, in synch with their characteristic lawlessness, they went ahead and demanded the same.

As the outgoing incumbent with a stable of legion legal advisors salaried at public expense, the last thing that anybody ought to have expected of President John Dramani Mahama would be his outrageous demand to be allowed to permanently own, free-of-charge, the house in which he presently lived, which had been officially designated as the home of all serving Vice-Presidents of Ghana since 2001, or thereabouts.

And so one begins to get a curious sense that the request-maker, or petitioner, was both psychologically and emotionally troubled. Perhaps the latter state of affairs had been caused by the landslide defeat that he suffered at the hands of his immediate successor in the 2016 presidential election. In a real sense, the former Rawlings Communications Minister may be suffering from what may be aptly termed as a Post-Election Loss Trauma Syndrome (PELTS).

Now, don’t ask me how I came by such a term; I just made it made, because his widely alleged misbehavior was one that was quite easy to diagnose as such (See “Akufo-Addo Accepted Mahama’s Request to Stay in His Official Residence – Inusah Fuseini” MyJoyOnline.com / Modernghana.com 1/14/17). According to Mr. Inusah Fuseini, the trusted Mahama lieutenant and former Road-Transport Minister, the former President made his inexcusably bizarre request of his successor in the solemn presence of His Royal Majesty, The Asantehene, Otumfuo Osei-Tutu, II.

Somebody has already asked, with good reason, that the hallowed name of Otumfuo not be drawn into this most outrageous controversy. And so other than to simply concur and promptly observe the fact that there is glaring evidence pointing to an inescapable fabrication of this aspect of this weird story, we shall have to leave matters as they ought to be. At any rate, why would an outgoing highest-ranking public official of the land presume to so cavalierly drag the name of the Asantehene into this most lawless and depraved of all requests?

Of course, there was nothing new or anomalous here. And it was the fact that not quite a while before this one-up attempt on the newly elected Ghanaian leader, the then-incumbent President John Dramani Mahama had made himself globally infamous when he casually rode roughshod over the decision of the Wood Supreme Court, in the landmark matter of the conviction and prison sentencing of the gang of rabidly sexist National Democratic Congress-sponsored media propagandists nicknamed the “Montie Three,” by flagrantly springing these foulmouthed criminal convicts who had publicly threatened to sexually violate Chief Justice Georgina T. Wood, out of the globally infamous Nsawam Medium-Security Prison, where the trio was serving four months apiece.

Thus, it is quite clear that just as he had facilely and deviously and contemptuously used a rubber-stamp membership of the Council-of-State to nullify the authority of the Supreme Court in the case of the Montie Three, Mr. Mahama had intended to equally use the revered name and presence of The Asantehene to ride roughshod over the democratic and constitutional laws of the land. But, of course, we also know that all these stories about Messrs. Mahama and Akufo-Addo’s having struck an oral gentlemen’s agreement to cavalierly breach the sacred laws of the land, for the especial and exclusive benefit of the former Atta-Mills lieutenant, is a load of codswallop, as a Londoner would say.

And it is precisely for this reason why Mr. Julius Debrah, the Sumo Wrestler-looking Mahama electioneering-campaign show-horse of a Chief-of-Staff, had to write a letter claiming that it was rather he, the letter writer, and Mr. Yaw Osafo-Maafo, the respective chairpersons of the two presidential transition teams, who had worked out a deal curiously approving Mr. Mahama’s decision not to vacate the official residence of the Vice-President of Ghana. Mr. Osafo Maafo has since vehemently rejected Mr. Debrah’s contention.

It goes without saying that were he a law-abiding Ghanaian citizen and leader, Mr. Mahama would have promptly vacated the residence or vice-presidential abode in question, shortly after the death of President John Evans Atta-Mills and his assumption of the latter’s post as Interim-President of the Republic of Ghana. The house could then have been occupied by the newly selected Interim-Vice-President Kwesi Bekoe Amissah-Arthur.

In other words, by the time that he reportedly made his request to then-President-Elect Akufo-Addo, the then-outgoing President Mahama had already been in flagrant breach of the residential laws pertaining to the executive for more than 4 years! And so the question of whether, indeed, Nana Akufo-Addo had consented to Mr. Mahama’s unorthodox request of permanently keeping the designated official residence of Ghana’s Vice-President, does not even come into play here.

What we clearly have here is a dyed-in-the-wool scofflaw who, having been literally caught with his pants down, would have somebody else bear the righteous brunt of public indignation.

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