Who let this pig out of his sty?

By: Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Ph.D.

I have since long informed this Joseph Yamin political hanger-on that he has absolutely no business speaking out of his league and out of turn. But this oafish butterball does not seem to get it; not that we expect him to ever get it. I mean, a career of ministerial deputizing is not exactly any deep-thinking person’s idea of a cutting-edge or an astute politician. Well, for those of our readers who may have so soon forgotten the global embarrassment that this cognitive and moral basket case caused this nation, Mr. Yamin is the former Deputy Sports Minister who flew millions of dollars in raw cash on Ghana’s presidential plane to Brazil during the 2014 World Cup, to pay disgruntled players of the Black Stars’ and ended up losing a huge chunk of the money in taxes to the Brazilian government, when the money could easily and wisely have been wired into the bank accounts of these same players at little or no costs at all.

This is the legacy that this Arab-looking bastard left in the annals of Ghanaian soccer. As Deputy Asante Regional Minister, Mr. Yamin was best known for his rabble-rousing activities and factional wrangling with his immediate boss which, if memory serves yours truly accurately, forced then-President John Dramani Mahama to personally fly into the Asante regional capital of Kumasi to break up a fisticuff between the extant substantive Regional Minister and this impudent political parasite, who has made lining his pocket and his wallet with the Ghanaian taxpayer’s money his pet vocation. Yamin had better wake up, take a “Dettol bath” and dress up and seek a regular 9-to-5 job like the rest of his classmates and peers, and stop blowing hot air about President Akufo-Addo’s being supposedly unable to solve the problem of perennial erratic power supply or “Dumsor,” the most salient contribution of the erstwhile Mills-Mahama and Mahama/Amissah-Arthur regimes to the history of gross administrative incompetence in the country and the global community at large (See “Former Minister Attacks Akufo-Addo, Prof. Martey” MyNewsGh.com / Ghanaweb.com 2/28/17).

As Deputy Coordinator of the National Disaster Management Organization (NADMO), Mr. Yamin has equally been an also-run or nondescript. And so, really, this chubby little man has absolutely no moral credibility and authority to presume to pontifically upbraid the barely two-month-old Akufo-Addo Administration on its allegedly poor handling of power supply and distribution in the country. Maybe some levelheaded somebody ought to remind unconscionable cynics and congenital buffoons like the man who once bitterly complained about having been rudely denied entry into the Ghana Military Academy, that the Mills- and Mahama-led governments of the National Democratic Congress spent 8 protracted years at the Flagstaff House systematically destroying the country’s industrial base.

And so it is nothing short of the criminally preposterous for Mr. Yamin to even remotely suggest that the voters who offered President Akufo-Addo their decisive mandate have, somehow, already begun to wish that former President Mahama was back at the Flagstaff House sanguinely and jauntily and systematically supervising their summary and thoroughgoing economic destruction, once again. Fat chance!

By: Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Ph.D.
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs