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

It is about time the government of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) candidly and publicly issued a statement clearly acknowledging the fact that, indeed, there is only one substantive Deputy Information Minister, and that the other one that anybody hardly hears about these days is actually the Ministerial Receptionist, a position that has been nominally elevated to the status of Deputy Minister purely for purposes of salary disbursement (See “Stick to ‘All-Die-Be-Die’ and Leave Our Slogan Alone – Okudzeto” Ghanaweb.com 7/22/12).

Maybe the ideologically unsuspecting lot among the key operatives of the National Democratic Congress ought to be promptly apprised of the fact that the cynically populist slogan of “People Matter, You Matter,” has its incontrovertible origins in the famous Akan-Ghanaian drum-script which roughly translates as follows: “When I call the name of money,/ money does not respond./When I call the name of a stone,/ the stone does not respond./It is the human being that matters most.”

As a distilled political slogan, the phrase was first invoked between the late 1940s and 1950s by Dr. J. B. Danquah, in several of his heated exchanges with the then-Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah and his so-called Convention People’s Party (CPP). It is therefore not accurate for any operative of either major Fourth-Republican Ghanaian political party to claim that the slogan was coined either in August last year, or even in the heated lead-up to Election 2008.

What is clear about the patently desperate struggle between key players of both the National Democratic Congress and the New Patriotic Party, is the fact that so poorly have both political parties performed during the course of Ghana’s 20-year-old Fourth-Republican democratic dispensation that the campaign for the electoral mandate of the people should come to be pathetically dominated by mere political sloganeering.

Indeed, when Mr. Samuel Okudzeto-Ablakwa rather casually asserts that “the good works and massive projects [initiated] by the Mills-led [NDC government] will make Ghanaians endorse President Mills’ second-term bid,” the Deputy Information Minister must be either strung up on some narcotic contraband, or he simply delights in insulting the intelligence of Ghanaian voters and taxpayers.

Still, what was singularly significant about his stump endorsing the candidacy of Nii Lantey Vanderpuije, the rabidly anti-Akan NDC parliamentary candidate for the Odododiodioo Constituency of Central-Accra, was the bombshell that Mr. Ablakwa dropped regarding the acutely fragile health status of President John Evans Atta-Mills. On the latter score, this is what the North- [or South] Tongu NDC-MP Candidate for Election 2012 had to say: “NDC is winning the 2012 elections ‘one-touch.’ Today is the President’s birthday and we are very happy to gather here as one family. Next year by this time[,] we’ll be happy to have him as our president and celebrate his first six months in office.” And then what happens next? as my two toddler-sons are wont to say.

Indeed, about the only massive projects that the NDC has to boast about before the Ghanaian electorate are the ongoing criminally epic scandals of the judgment-debt fleecing of our nation’s coffers, largely by key operatives of the National Democratic Congress and their foreign contractual paymasters.

People matter, indeed; but definitely not in the warped and politically alienated imagination of the proverbial movers-and-shakers of the Mills-Mahama government of the so-called National Democratic Congress.

*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 Director of The Sintim-Aboagye Center for Politics and Culture and author of “Dr. J. B. Danquah: Architect of Modern Ghana” (iUniverse.com, 2005). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net. ####