One sick Atta Mills is 10 times better than 10 healthy Akufo-Addos put together. People like NPP’s Elizabeth Ohene better get it straight since it is obvious she belongs to the group of the very few strangers in Ghana’s Jerusalem who still delude themselves that NPP’s flagbearer, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo can beat NDC’s President Atta Mills at the next presidential poll to become president of Ghana on grounds of the cheap propaganda that President Mills is sick.

Elizabeth Ohene’s ilk thinks they are so smart as to use subtle and invidious ways in constantly playing up the deflated rumour about the so-called failing health condition of President Mills.

In an article of hers posted on ghanaweb on 18th December 2010, entitled ‘African Leaders’ Health A Secret’ the former presidential press secretary to former President Kufuor stated about the so-called ill health of President Mills as follows:

“For a man who was not expected to make it to the end of 2008, to even get elected or so we were told by people in the know, the Ghanaian President John Atta Mills has survived with amazing agility. And yet the rumours persist.
“The latest stories were sparked by the fact that the president’s palms have turned alarmingly black.”

First of all, who did not expect then candidate Mills to make it to the end of 2008? Of course that was the fervent wish of Elizabeth Ohene’s New Patriotic Party (NPP) - a very wicked wish by a desperate political party that is ready to do just anything for political power. What a shame!

Elizabeth Ohene’s motive for the write-up is clear. She wants to draw further attention to, or reemphasise, the “rumours,” that President Mills must have been suffering from a serious health problem and is on his way to his grave, something that can happen very soon. And then what?

The answer is simple. Like her party, the NPP, trumpeted before and during the last general elections, Elizabeth Ohene is reiterating the worn-out NPP propaganda that Ghanaians need not retain President Mills in office on grounds that he is suspected to have a failing health condition that might end up killing him soon.

The NPP circulated the well-coordinated “rumours” to a crescendo in the 2008 elections when it was widely publicised, in the character of a wild bushfire, that the then NDC flagbearer had died in a Bloemfontein hospital in South Africa whilst undergoing surgery for an unnamed health condition.
This was after several months of spreading the “rumours” that he was sick, and just about a week following a Machiavellian publication in one of their newspapers that he was flown to South Africa in a coma.
But the ‘dead’ Atta Mills ‘resurrected’ and, as fate would have it, he has become the President of Ghana following a fiercely fought election. But the rumourmongers like Elizabeth Ohene will not stop their senseless enterprise. She continues: “After weeks of speculation in the media, one of the president’s spokespersons has offered an explanation. The president, we are told, is well, his darkened palms are a reaction to some medication given to him by his doctors.
“We have not been told what the medication was or what condition the president had to necessitate taking the drugs in the first place. But the spokesperson assured us the president is very strong and stable, and has been given a clean bill of health by all the doctors. He said the president still gets up at 4.30am every day and does his exercises, and is still the same sports person he has always been.
“Somehow the image of our president getting up at 4.30am every morning as though he has a wicked stepmother who is whipping him out of bed to do the chores, is hard to take.”
What is Elizabeth Ohene’s problem can only be explained by her and her NPP. Is the ‘exceedingly black hand’ President Atta Mills incapable of performing his duties as president of Ghana in anyway? Or is Elizabeth Ohene saying she and the NPP are so blind and death that when the President speaks, or acts in anyway, they cannot hear and see because his palms have become “exceedingly black”?
Even the President’s habit of waking up early to start his duties in ensuring a better Ghana is problematic so far as Elizabeth Ohene is concerned. Thank God we do not have a president who will always go to work at 11am and close before everybody knows it in order to engage in all manner of unfruitful activities at the expense of the suffering masses of the people of Ghana.
We all watched with total dismay how Elizabeth Ohene’s former boss, former President Kufuor was a habitual late comer to work.
But more precisely, it is important for the Elizabeth Ohenes of the NPP to know that when the Kufuor-led NPP government left a collapsed economy with a whooping TOR debt of 1.488 billion Ghana cedis among other things for President Mills and the NDC government to fix, only a wicked and incompetent president could afford to go to work at 11 am after inheriting such a mess from the vuvuzela government of the NPP of which Elizabeth Ohene was an integral part.
Elizabeth Ohene must be reminded that like she said on behalf of Mr Kufuor after the daylight massacre of the Ya Na and 40 others at the Gbewa Palace in Yendi under the NPP regime that the Abudus belonged to the NPP and therefore the Kufuor government was supporting them, the problem created by her NPP government in Dagbon is part of the reasons why President Mills would have to wake up at 4am to start work in an effort to solve it.
In this case, one cannot be wrong in saying that the wicked stepmother who is whipping President Mills out of bed that early is Elisabeth Ohene’s NPP.
Elizabeth Ohene must also understand that the state lands and bungalows which her NPP government officials, cronies and functionaries grabbed for themselves as if there would be no tomorrow, is another reason President Mills cannot sleep beyond 4am. The wicked stepmother called the NPP has made sure President Mills would be up by 4am on his feet working hard to halt the wanton thievery of state property in this country by shameless politicians and their friends.
We can go on and on about the kickbacks being grabbed by Elizabeth Ohene’s boss at the Castle, the unprecedented levels of official corruption Ghanaians witnessed under the NPP government and so on and so forth. These are the reason president Mills cannot afford to sleep beyond 4am but will not at the end of the day put a big gold chain around his neck calling it the highest state award like Mr Kufuor did for only God knows which work done.
Now read this line of Elizabeth Ohene’s piece: “Should we or should we not be told about the state of the president’s health? In Ghana we have always gone for the extreme privacy option. Our leaders are never ill and indeed they do not even get tired.
And they certainly do not die.”
We have heard time and again from these characters how President Mills was going to die the next day because he “is very sick.” We are simply tired of these shenanigans of people like Elizabeth Ohene of the NPP who think that by playing up this senseless rumour from time to time, it would keep alive their hope that President Mills will suddenly die one of these days, a situation they believe is the trump card for Akufo-Addo becoming president. They lie bad!