Ras Mubarak, Look Up-North And Volta Regions

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Dec. 30, 2014
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

I have already written about the question of whether the current voters' register is bloated or not, and so I would not attempt to shadow box in this piece. What is valid, however, is the imperative need for the Electoral Commission (EC) to review the formula by which some constituencies in the three northern regions and the Volta Region, in particular, came to to be fully represented in Parliament, although the populations in these constituencies fall well below the constitutionally stipulated 50,000 people.

Nana Akufo-Addo, the 2016 Presidential Candidate of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) is more likely to have a good fight here (See "Ras Mubarak Taunts Akufo-Addo" Starrfmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 12/30/14). Well, the so-called Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the National Youth Authority (NYA), Mr. Ras Mubarak, has reportedly decided to join the fray over whether, indeed, the current voters' register is "Over-Bloated." Maybe Mr. Mubarak needs to go back to school and brush up his diction a little bit. There is no such grammatical expression as an "Over-Bloated" voters' register.

The voters' register is either bloated or it is not bloated; it simply cannot be "Over-Bloated." It is almost as if the implicit suggestion here is that packing up the voters' register with ghost names is an ordinarily acceptable protocol in the way that elections are routinely conducted in the country, except that in the instance that Nana Akufo-Addo is reported to have told some NPP supporters in London, UK, such routine and generally accepted padding of the voters' register has been taken to such an extreme as to flagrantly distort the entire electoral process beyond democratic acceptability, whatever the latter may be widely understood to represent.

I also thought that this Ras Mubarak chap, with his absurdly oversized job description, used to have an authentic indigenous Ghanaian name. And so, if I may politely ask, whatever happened to his original Ghanaian nominal identity, or perhaps the easiest way to secure a GYEEDA-SADA-SUBAH-like plum job from Little Dramani and his so-called National Democratic Congress (NDC) these days, is to radically undergo a Pauline sort of name change? I like the guy a tad bit, by the way, if also because he strikingly looks like the illegitimate grandson of the immortalized President Julius Karamoge Nyerere, late, of Tanzania, Africa's one and only "Mwalimu."

You see, while I was coming up in Kumasi among the likes of Paa Kwesi Evans, I have long forgotten the names of some of the most delightful people to have been privileged to have hung around with, they used to call it the National Youth Council (NYC). And then the PNDC Abongo Boys shot their bloody way into the old Osu-Accra Danish slave castle and renamed it the National Youth Organizing Commission (NYOC).Those were the days when Mr. Gariba Bawa, against great odds, delivered Ghanaians some of the best radio-broadcast pieces on the GBC program called "Ghana Newsreel."

I once happened to be on a bus enroute to Accra which stopped by Mr. Bawa's small Kumasi residence, as he came out, briefly chatted with our driver, and handed him a tape-recorded newsy piece to be given to the producers back in the National Studios of the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation. And now the National Youth Organizing Commission has been redesignated the National Youth Authority (NYA). Now, my dear reader, amidst all these prismatic and acrobatic name changes, what has really changed about the way that youth development is officially done in Ghana today? Very likely, not much has changed.

Back in those days, if memory serves yours truly accurately, the National Youth Council had no such Accra-based portfolio as Chief Executive Officer; and yet I am of the firm believe that we, the youths of yesteryear, performed our duties much more efficiently and with far greater imagination and inventiveness than the Ras Mubarak Gang. In the Kumasi office of the NYOC, I was briefly in charge of Health or Chop-Bar Hygiene, before I started directing heavy midday traffic at Kejetia. I would also organize a drama troupe, put up performances at the Kumasi Technical Institute (KTI), and raise funds for the National Society for the Crippled, then head by one City Council employee called Mr. Atakora, who lived near the Abrepo Junction Lorry Park. These days, our youths and their elderly political patrons are busy trafficking narcotic contrabands out of the country.

Thus it makes perfect sense to have a Chief Executive Officer at the National Youth Authority. The latter job description is almost akin to having an Ambassador Extraordinary And Plenipotentiary represent the party of the Mosquito General and Little Dramani in the ISIS/L Republic of Taliban. Yes, My Dear Mr. Mubarak: It is incontrovertibly true that the 100-plus New Patriotic Party MPs won their parliamentary seats by the same voters' register that Nana Akufo-Addo has been complaining about in recent weeks. But it is equally true that the combined total votes garnered by the New Patriotic Party MPs far outweighs that of the National Democratic Congress' Parliamentary Majority.

The unpleasant fact of the matter is that somebody has been seasonally cheating Ghanaians and getting away with his loot, and is even being heartily festooned with laurels and patted on the back. And we both know who that congenital cheater is; but even more significantly, we also know how to stop this cheater in his tracks!

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