John Mahama Uses the Language of a Loser

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

It used to be that the best way for a politician to win an election, was to make a religious habit of paying “courtesy calls” on our chiefs and other traditional leaders. Those were the days when chiefs wielded great influence over the destiny and mind-set of the people. Those days are, of course, largely behind us, though watching the Vice-Presidential Candidate of the so-called National Democratic Congress (NDC) hop and scotch from one traditional ruler to another, just like a proverbial one-legged chicken, one would think that ours were still those “good, old days.”

That, to be certain, is the humorous aspect of the P/NDC presidential campaign for Election 2008. The real aspect, or that which exudes the true nature and character of the pathetically jaded Rawlings Corporation (or R. C. Unlimited) is when candidates like Messrs. Atta-Mills and Mahama begin to speak as if we were back to the terror-charged days of December 31, 1981, that bloody blotch on Ghana’s history, when one could, literally, vanish into thin air and not have relatives even attempt to mourn the deliberately vanished because, according to P/NDC “revolutionary” mantra, that benign attempt, in of itself, amounted to criminally consorting with “Enemies of the Revolution.” It must, indeed, have been with the foregoing smugly etched in the back of his mind, when the Candidate for Veep, or is it Deputy Flagbearer, of the NDC, Mr. John Dramani Mahama, recently declared to the Chief and people of Bechem, in the Brong-Ahafo Region, that there was no way that the NDC could lose the December general election (Ghanaweb.com 7/15/08).

Now, that is the veritable language of a loser – no pun intended here, of course. For whoever heard of any candidate refusing to concede the outcome of an election that has yet to be held, particularly when the speaker has already conceded such loss, twice, at the polls? In short, either Mr. John “Zulu-sounding middle name” Mahama is, literally, off his rockers, as New Yorkers would say, and therefore in dire need of prompt psychiatric examination, or the man is simply underestimating the quick wit and intelligence of an electorate that has endured twenty years of systematically orchestrated “culture of silence,” even as those who claimed to be the most upright and accountable among us, literally, took us to the cleaners. In sum, somebody had better boldly tell Mr. Mahama to stop talking and behaving as if the Ghanaian electorate owed him and his fellow P/NDC robber barons their very lives and destiny. For truth be said, Ghanaians owe Messrs. Atta-Mills and Mahama absolutely nothing! So how do we come by such haughtiness?

The answer to the foregoing, to be certain, lies elsewhere in another article in which this writer critically examined the barely veiled rhetorical threat of Mr. Mahama and his P/NDC posse of self-appointed destroyers of Ghana, in general (see “Mahama Sees Ghanaians as Horses to be Permanently Ridden by Heat-Staggered NDC,” Special Reports, Ghanaian Statesman). Recently, for example, in the wake of Justice Harriet Abban’s sentencing of Mr. Tsatsu Tsikata to a piddling and outright insulting 5-year prison term, the trial itself had lasted 6 years, one of the 31st December thugs issued an Electronic Mail (E-mail) message not-so-subtly adumbrating on the convicted criminal’s sympathizers’ great desire to repeating the apocalyptic events of June 30, 1982. And so it is not quite clear exactly what the man with the Zulu-sounding middle name means when he arrogantly vaunts that it is practically impossible for the National Decapitators’ Congress (NDC) to lose Election 2008, except only if the NDC also has a plan in works to flood the blood of at least 55-percent of Ghanaians who did not vote for the P/NDC in Election 2004, and do not intend, come rain or storm, to vote for the P/NDC in Election 2008?

Maybe some of our readers may not know this, but Bechem, where Mr. John “Zulu-sounding middle name” Mahama issued his barely veiled threat of mayhem on Monday, July 14, 2008, was once a political hotspot. Back in the days when the African Show Boy held Ghanaians by our scruff, the way that a dog owner holds his pet on a leash, an independent-minded and forward-thinking Chief of Bechem was summarily deposed and a marionette planted in his stead. But that is not the real beauty of this narrative; the latter aspect lies in the temerity of Africa’s Man of Destiny not only to enstool a marionette as Chief of Bechem – and I am quite certain that some of us still remember that early Sunday evening program on GBC-TV called “Koliko” – but even more breathtakingly, to also elevate this same marionette to the enviable status of a Paramount Chief. Of course, that was the point of the entire process: to spite indigenous Ghanaian cultural protocol. For the Show Boy was simply testing the fullest extent to which he could readily get away with the radical destruction – he actually called it “transformation” – of our hitherto hallowed system of Chieftaincy. And at Bechem where, by the way, the Rev. T. H. Sintim, this writer’s maternal grandfather, also served the Presbyterian Church of Ghana for quite awhile, the African Show Boy succeeded in, literally, cannibalizing the very institution that makes most Ghanaians the proud and civilized Africans that we have been for centuries, and the source of great wonder to Western colonialists, the most honest among whom even came to regard us as the very founders, or makers, of what we now call Western Civilization.

It goes without saying that the Show Boy had chutzpah, and Nana Fosu Gyeabour II, the Chief of Bechem, appears to have remembered a little bit of this sad episode in the history of his people, which was precisely why the Chief subtly counseled the man with the Zulu-sounding middle name “to allow the humility that made him shine out of the [rest of the P/NDC scam-artist] lot to guide him through his political career.” And lest he gets prematurely swollen-headed, Nana Fosu Gyeabour Akoto was simply being sardonic, if the reader knows what I mean.

“We will check armed robbery,” Mr. Mahama was reported by the Ghana News Agency (GNA) to have said. Reading the same later, however, I almost fell off my chair and flat on my face laughing. Of course, the P/NDC would check armed robbery; for who are these armed robbers that Mr. Mahama is talking about, but the AK-47-embossed “Umbrella People” themselves? After all, under whose watch did those umpteen number of 40year-plus-old women go missing all over the Ghanaian metropolis of Accra? And our Supreme Court judges? Yes, John “Zulu-sounding middle name” Mahama continued, “An NDC government will check armed robbery,” which, of course, simply means that a highly unlikely NDC government would restore our stolen assets in GIHOC…. Until one gets to the penultimate paragraph of the GNA report, which is exactly where the innately destructive tendencies of the P/NDC burst uncontrollably into our faces.

“An NDC government would not scrap the [National] Health Insurance Scheme, National Youth Employment Program, Capitation Grant and the Metro Mass Transit Service and other social interventions as being speculated[,] but would rather review some of them” (Ghanaweb.com 7/15/08). “Review” some of what?!! Watch out, people, a Gaboon Viper is on the prowl!

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is the author of 17 books, including “Ghanaian Politics Today” (Atumpan Publications/lulu.com, 2008) and “Dr. J. B. Danquah: Architect of Modern Ghana” (iUniverse.com, 2005). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@aol.com.