As President, Mr. John Dramani Mahama told Ghanaians that none of these citizens whose votes and mandate put him into the Jubilee-Flagstaff House qualified to either criticize or call his abysmally poor performance into question, because absolutely none of them had been privileged enough to occupy the most powerful administrative seat of the land. I also don’t remember whether the former Communications Minister under the tenure of Chairman Jerry John Rawlings had hosted any remarkable or notable press conferences as Ghana’s Executive Chief of State. It was for this reason why I could not stop myself from guffawing, when Mr. Franklin Cudjoe, the Founding-President of the IMANI-Africa policy-monitoring think-tank, was reported by the media to have virulently accused President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo of behaving intolerantly like a “communist leader,” because Ghana’s former Attorney-General and Minister of Justice had dared to suggest that the criticisms of most opponents of his government were like “dark spots” that lacked substance (See “Franklin Cudjoe on President Akufo-Addo’s Encounter with the Media” Modernghana.com 12/20/18).
Maybe somebody needs to remind the young IMANI-Africa think-tanker that there was a time in postcolonial Ghana, respectively, under the tenures of President Kwame Nkrumah and Chairman Jerry John Rawlings, when merely complaining about the poor state of the country’s economy, under Ghana’s first postcolonial leader, would have landed the oblique or indirect critic in the slammer or the Nsawam Medium-Security Prison. Those were the days when civil and public servants marked down as opponents or non-Nkrumah partisans listened to the One O’clock news with their wireless or radio sets under their beds. “One-O’clock Fever.” Yes, that was what the “You are hereby dismissed with immediate effect” or “Report yourself to the nearest police station” was primarily about. Under the “Rawlings Revolution,” you could be instantly branded as an “Enemy of the State” for any countless number of reasons and summarily executed by firing squad.
And so, one wonders what schools or academies Mr. Cudjoe attended in Ghana, as well as what history and political science textbooks he was exposed to at any of our nation’s tertiary academies. You see, merely because Nana Akufo-Addo spent most of his adult public life as a civil rights advocate and a civil society organizational leader does not mean that the renowned lawyer must take abuse and gratuitous insults from his political opponents lying down. That would be absolutely and quixotically suicidal. You see, when then-President John Mahama stood before the Okyeman Council and imperiously called Kyebi “The Galamsey Capital of Ghana,” I did not hear the likes of the IMANI-Africa Founding-President call prompt attention to the fact that the wanton destruction of the Akyem-Abuakwa landscape, waterbodies and forestry resources was due to the gross incompetence of Key National Democratic Congress’ operatives like the former President.
Not surprisingly, democratically deposed and rabidly bitter Mr. Mahama would assume the unconscionable status of Drum-Major for these illegal miners, on the equally criminal grounds that the scarcely one-year-old Akufo-Addo-led New Patriotic Party (NPP) government had not created adequate and livable-wage jobs for the Galamseyers. This moral reprobate and socioeconomic and cultural nihilist recently paid nearly a half-million cedis to have the beehive of NDC party crooks and scam-artists nominate him as the National Democratic Congress’ 2020 Presidential Candidate. Indeed, except for former President John Agyekum-Kufuor, one of the most significant leaders of the Danquah-Busia-Dombo school of neoliberal democrats, in Ghana’s Fourth Republic, when it comes to any national discourse on leadership tolerance and accommodation, President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has absolutely no rival or compeer.
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