Why build bridges with killers and thugs?

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D. English Department, SUNY-Nassau Garden City, New York February 12, 2017 E-mail: [email protected]

The problem with Ghanaian politics is the average Ghanaian intellectual, particularly media instructors like Mr. Osei Kwadwo Addo, or Kwadwo Osei Addo, of the Ghana Institute of Journalism (GIJ), who seem to have their thinking caps upended, or turned upside down, that is, if they happen to have any thinking caps at all. Otherwise Mr. Addo, who is also described as a lawyer, would not be faulting Ms. Otiko Afisa Djaba, the newly sworn Gender, Children and Social Protection Minister, for daring to exercise her free-speech rights in caustically criticizing then-President John Dramani Mahama, her first cousin, I have been told, for possessing “the heart of the devil” and being an immitigably “wicked man,” besides his lurid exhibition of gross administrative incompetence in the lead-up to Election 2016.

Surprisingly, Mr. Addo, and I plead ignorant of his legal practice or specialty, would have the Ghanaian public believe that Ms. Djaba’s all-too-righteous refusal to kowtow to the Mahama Sanhedrin pack of hoodlums on the Parliamentary Appointments Committee (PAC), is apt to court a groundswell of hatred for President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo in the lead-up to Election 2020. Big deal! Maybe somebody needs to remind the GIJ lecturer that Nana Akufo-Addo fiercely fought three epic battles with the key operatives of the godforsaken National Democratic Congress (NDC) prior to him gaining a foothold into the Flagstaff House, none of which was gloriously punctuated by any effusions of love whatsoever. The NDC operatives are also widely known to have applauded the brutal acid-dousing assassination of Mr. Adams Mahama, then-New Patriotic Party (NPP) Chairman of the Upper-East Region, by some factional elements within the NPP virulently opposed to the presidential ambitions and electioneering campaign of the now-President Akufo-Addo.

It is quite obvious that both the internal detractors of Nana Akufo-Addo and their allies among the vanguard ranks of the main opposition National Democratic Congress are deeply traumatized by their decisive defeat in the 2016 presidential election. But that was no reason to cowardly attempt to scapegoat Ms. Djaba for their own self-engineered debacle. For starters, it was extremely unprofessional for the NDC-PAC members to casually presume that they could turn the vetting session of the Gender, Children and Social Protection Minister into a referendum whose predetermined objective was to indemnify and/or sanctify an irreparably self-damaged President Mahama, a man whose presidency brought Ghana down to the lowest rung on the dignity ladder both at home and on the international stage. We would even have a Chinese Second-Deputy Foreign Minister call a well-attended press conference in Accra to mordantly lambaste the Mahama government’s alleged gross mistreatment of illegal Chinese miners, otherwise known as “galamsayers.”

I did not follow the bulk of the vetting sessions of the Parliamentary Appointments Committee of the Akufo-Addo ministerial appointees, but it well appears to me that the PAC Chairman and the New Patriotic Party’s Member of Parliament for Asante-Bekwai, Mr. Joseph Osei-’Wusu ought to have put his two feet on the ground and demanded the immediate expulsion of any PAC member who had absolutely nothing constructive to offer the stated agenda of the committee, besides running an extraneous litmus test on which of these Akufo-Addo cabinet appointees hated former President Mahama the most or the least. The NDC minority parliamentary operatives ought to be clearly and boldly told that the Mahama dictatorship was brought to a definitive conclusion on January 7, 2017. And also that it is a new progressive era that is more fully focused on the country’s development than the salvaging of the irreparably mangled image and reputation of damaged political goods of yesteryear.

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