The scandalous stupidity of some local Ghanaian celebrities and some Ghanaian media personalities and operatives is simply staggering. Yes, I also saw the stagey panhandling of Ms. Joyce Dzidzor Mensah on a German passenger train the other day, in which the actor/actress who once scammed the Ghana Aids Commission, as the latter’s public face or representative, presumed to impugn the common sense and leadership skills and as was not the least bit amused. The videoclip was Whatsapped to me by a relative. It is unwarrantably sarcastic because it seeks to mock President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo as a Ghanaian leader who has either witheringly lost his way or sense of priorities for the development of the country or simply never had any sense of priorities for the same.
But what scandalized me even more was the seemingly woeful inability of media operatives like Captain “Godsbrain” Smart, whatever his real name is, to cut through the slimy propagandistic imbecility of the Akufo-Addo mocker. You see, when it comes to the dogged pursuit of development priorities, it goes without saying that Nana Akufo-Addo has absolutely no peer among the rollcall of Fourth Republican Ghanaian leaders and, indeed, postcolonial Ghanaian leaders at large. For example, in just two years of being at the helm of our nation’s affairs, Nana Akufo-Addo has opened basic-education access to all talented, qualified and capable Ghanaian youths. And on the latter count, of course, I am talking about the recently and unprecedently implemented fee-free Senior High School Policy Initiative.
And yet, Ms. Dzidzor Mensah was mock-panhandling on the German passenger train maligning, rather unwisely, the country’s most visionary and progressive leader, simply because Nana Akufo-Addo had morally aptly embarked on the construction of an interdenominational and multipurpose National Cathedral when, in the irredeemably warped opinion of the shameless scam-artist critic, most Ghanaian schoolchildren were attending classes on bare and unpaved floors. Well, I suppose Ms. Dzidzor Mensah was either not born or living abroad when the leaders of her own political party, the National Democratic Congress, launched the tribal reign-of-terror Rawlings-Tsikata Diarchy that literally supervised the wanton destruction of Ghana’s infrastructural and industrial resources for some 20-odd years. To be certain, all in all, the Rawlings-Tsikata-led erstwhile Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) and the Rawlings, PV Obeng and Ahwoi Brothers-fangled faux-socialist National Democratic Congress wasted the precious time and material resources of Ghanaian citizens for some 30 years!
You see, what the likes of Captain Smart ought to be looking at is the fact of whether President Akufo-Addo has been on schedule or woefully behind schedule with his electioneering campaign agenda or promises vis-à-vis the performance track-record of his predecessors, and not merely the fact of whether electing to privately solicit funding for the construction of his proposed non-denominational and multipurpose National Cathedral detracts from his overall development agenda. Besides, whoever said massive industrial economies and all, there are absolutely no homeless citizens and lumpen-poor people in countries like Germany, France, Spain, Italy, the UK, the US, and France? What scandalous and parochially minded stupidity on the part of Ms. Dzidzor Mensah and her Amen corner cheering squad captives!
The fact of the matter is that when it comes to progressive and visionary leadership and development programs and projects, Nana Akufo-Addo is simply in a class all by himself. Yes, I readily recognized the sarcasm in the patently quixotic cantata sketch by Ms. Dzidzor Mensah all right, but such repulsively cheap and tawdry display of grotesque African self-denigration clearly lacked the kind of wit that Captain Smart and his addled-brained colleagues wanted their audiences to applaud. I even heard one of the studio’s talking-heads rather simplistically suggest that so lambent-witted or nonesuch genius act was the former Ghana Aids Commission’s scammer that Ms. Dzidzor Mensah was bound for Jubilee House. Are our journalists and media operatives this intellectually low-powered?
The dramatic irony here is that if, indeed, Ms. Dzidzor Mensah had the proverbial good head on her shoulders, she would have readily and, even sheepishly, remembered that historically momentous day, late last year, when the German Chancellor, Mrs. Angela Merkel, briefly stopped over in Accra to confer with President Akufo-Addo and initialed a Memorandum-of-Understanding (MoU) for the establishment of the fourth and latest of the Volkswagen-manufacturing company’s industrial plants on the African continent right here in Ghana. Then also, just a couple of weeks ago, global economic experts, largely from the West, were touting Akufo-Addo’s Ghana as one of the fastest-growing economies, if not the fastest-growing economy, in the world, at some 8.5 percent. So where is all this nonsensical and childish display of cynical sarcasm coming from?
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