Opinions of Friday, 25 August 2017

Columnist: Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

Mahama can go dig up Gonjaland

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I have seen the EPA poster accompanying the news article claiming the Environmental Protection Agency to be saying that the younger brother of former President John Dramani Mahama may be acting illegally to cavalierly presume to have been issued a concessionary license by Forestry Commission operatives under the latter’s tenure to literally go digging anywhere the Mahamas dreamed of lifting huge chunks of gold, diamond or bauxite in the country.

But what really got my horse this time around, as it were, was a screed penned by one Mr. Abass Nurudeen which vitriolically attacks President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo for allegedly appointing his “siblings,” “baby-mamas” and sometime girlfriends and mistresses into highly sensitive positions of great influence and public trust in his government, without any equally prominent Ghanaian citizens raising fingers of indictment against the former Justice and Foreign Minister (See “NDC Alleges Wontumi Is Using A/R Minister to Settle Personal Scores with Ibrahim” Modernghana.com 8/24/17).

I haven’t read the contents of the EPA news article, but I keep wondering why Mr. Nurudeen and the rest of the Mahama Posse so smugly and imperiously believe that they can reduce the forested areas of the Akan regions of Ghana into Sierra Leone, without any concerned or responsible citizens of these lands exercising their inalienable rights to halt such predatory and criminally scandalous activities.

If, indeed, Mr. Nurudeen firmly believes that Mr. Ibrahim Mahama’s Exton Cubic Ltd – Where do they get these names, by the way? – has the potentiality of creating 40,000 direct and indirect jobs, with the establishment of a so-called “integrated Aluminum industry,” by all means, let the arrogant Mahamas take their damn bloody business to Gonjaland!

After all, hasn’t it been said times without number that “Charity begins at home”? And, after all, isn’t former President Mahama the only postcolonial Ghanaian leader who established a regional accelerated development board exclusively made up of northern-born Ghanaian citizens? Mr. Nurudeen also needs to name the Akufo-Addo “siblings, lovers and mistresses” in his government whom he thinks and/or believes are far less educated and professionally qualified than the Gonja clansmen and women of the former President who jampacked the Flagstaff House, including the one caught up in the $ 13 million Vice-Presidential Villa Scandal.

We are talking about justice and tit-for-tat here. Indeed, I pretty much remember the time, some three or four years ago, when the Mahamas used their electoral mandate to literally destroy mining equipment owned by Mr. Bernard Antwi-Boasiako (aka Chairman Wontumi) and imperiously attempted to run the Asante Regional Chairman of the then main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) out of town. The intervention of The Asantehene, Otumfuo Osei-Tutu, II, had been literally ridden roughshod over by the Gonja-Mahamas.

As the immortalized Mr. William Shakespeare had one of the most memorable characters say in one of his numerous classic plays, “Blood will have blood, I say!”