When Amissah-Arthur Does a “Sam George”

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

Vice-President Amissah-Arthur is right; if short people in Ghana are having a hard time recognizing the purportedly “massive achievements” of the tall robber-barons and baronesses who run the Mahama-led National Democratic Congress’ government, very likely such “massive achievements,” as the Vice-President would falsely have Ghanaian voters pretend to exist, have yet to reach and touch the ground, or the Earth, where real Ghanaians live (See “Short People Need to be Carried to See Mahama’s Achievements – Veep Teases” MyJoyOnline.com / Modernghana.com 9/23/16).

These rampant and riotous political jokes at the callous expense of the overwhelming majority of the Ghanaian electorate, by the tall and thievish leaders of the National Democratic Congress’ government, have dominated our national politics for nearly a decade and must not go unpunished this December.

In a country where the average height of an adult citizen is approximately 5 feet and 5 inches, what the Vice-President’s joke fundamentally implies, in both symbolic and practical terms, is that only a negligibly select few have actually benefited from the clearly “out-of-reach” achievements of the National Democratic Congress’ government.

This has precisely been the dead-on-target argument of Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, the three-time presidential candidate of Ghana’s main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), that this NDC government is the inexcusably corrupt government of a select few.

And the veep did not disappoint. For example, campaigning for his boss, President John Dramani Mahama and the latter’s robber-baron associates, in the Eastern Region, recently, the former Governor of the Bank of Ghana could only point to the construction of a handful of roads and piped water as the most obvious and greatest achievements of the National Democratic Congress.

Needless to say, anybody who has either lived in or traveled through the Eastern Region, unarguably one of the most resource-endowed regions of the country, can readily attest to the fact that the home-region of Nana Akufo-Addo, and a remarkable percentage of many of the greatest and most distinguished personalities ever produced by our country, has been criminally shortchanged by nearly every postcolonial Ghanaian government with the remarkable exception of the short-lived Busia-led government of the Progress Party (PP).

And so in an ironically practical sense, Vice-President Amissah-Arthur was criminally on target when he facetiously, albeit tastelessly, remarked that only tall people have absolutely no problem in recognizing the decidedly non-existent achievements of the Mahama regime.

We must also poignantly recall the fact that it was Mr. Samuel George Nettey, the NDC’s parliamentary candidate for the Ningo-Prampram Constituency, of the Greater-Accra Region, who first made the short in stature and the clinically disabled of Ghanaian society the butt of electioneering campaign jokes.

Back then, the Mahama hanger-on, or aide, was promptly and publicly disowned and denounced by the President and a host of other morally disciplined and responsible Ghanaian citizens.

That was nearly two years ago. And Mr. Nettey’s joke had been directed at the wheelchair-bound Mr. Ivor Kobina Greenstreet, the 2016 presidential candidate of the rump-Convention People’s Party (r-CPP).

Earlier on, during the 2008 presidential election, to be certain, NDC founding-father and Ghana’s longest reigning dictator Chairman Jerry John Rawlings had characteristically, albeit infelicitously, had occasion to refer to Nana Akufo-Addo as “that dwarf” at the august Manhyia Palace of the Asantehene, Otumfuo Osei-Tutu, II.

Now, to hear Vice-President Amissah-Arthur do a “Sam George” ought to inform every eligible short-statured adult Ghanaian voter that the Mahama-led National Democratic Congress’ government may be wide open to the membership and support of all Ghanaians, except those whom these unconscionable NDC robber-barons and baronesses have disdainfully classified as “short” and progress-blind which is, in fact, the overwhelming majority of eligible Ghanaian voters.