By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Sept. 11, 2015
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

Unless they do what Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia has convincingly demonstrated to be their best method of winning Presidential Elections in the country, that is ferrying in Togolese nationals/citizens with promises of free medical insurance and motorbikes, I don’t see how General Mosquito and his pathologically crooked operatives of the Mahama-led National Democratic Congress (NDC) can win the illusory one-million votes that they have targeted for Election 2016. Now that the Wood-presided judicial system has been exposed for the scam-artists that the overwhelming majority of Ghanaian judges are, maybe they may begin to learn a bit about the enlightened human instinct for shame and help infuse some remarkable modicum of integrity and credibility into the system.

We know that most of these judges were appointed to the bench by the “revolutionarily” self-righteous Chairman Jerry John Rawlings, thus his quickness to defending these moral reprobates and robber-barons. Whatever happened to his pontifical invocation and appropriation of the firing squad of yesteryear? Mr. Johnson Asiedu-Nketia, the official name of General Mosquito, claims that the National Democratic Congress has biometrically registered some 200,000 electorally eligible party members in the Asante Region. He has therefore charged each of these 200,000 registrants to draw in at least 5 non-NDC members in order to achieve the magic number. But, of course, they know fully well that this is highly unlikely because not very long ago, President John Dramani Mahama publicly lamented that even if he paved all the streets, alleyways and highways in the Asante Region with gold, Asantes would never appreciate such a good deed by his government.

Well, maybe somebody ought to have admonished him to finish providing adequate potable water to the people of Damongo, where he is widely known to have been born, before so cavalierly presuming to insult the intelligence of the indigenes of Asanteman. The Asantehene, of course, is largely to blame for such haughtiness on the part of the Bole-Bamboi native. And I am not just alluding to his “Yenntie Obiara” contretemps. His Majesty, Otumfuo Osei-Tutu II, has made certain cynical remarks about the special obligation that he owes Asanteman in the form of literally licking the boots of the Chief Resident of the Flagstaff House, in order to bring real-estate, or housing development, projects to the people of Bekwai and other Asante imperial principalities. The rest of us, the unmistakable implication goes, could take a hike.

You see, what I am looking forward to, at this time, is to have Mr. Bernard Antwi-Boasiako teach General Mosquito a real lesson in common sense politics by ensuring that the alleged 200,000 biometrically registered NDC members in the Asante Region is halved down to at the most 100,000 in the lead-up to Election 2016. The dictatorial and savage imposition of Dumsor is no progressive and civilized way to govern a country. At another time and place in the not-too-distant past, even as Mr. George Boateng, the Oyarifa NDC freight-forwarder, had occasion to tell his party’s acid-tongued General-Secretary, Chairman Rawlings would have summarily executed the Bui Dam Woyome by firing squad. Chairman Wontumi also has the bounden obligation to ensure that the NDC does not garner more than half the total votes Ghana’s leading ruling minority party bagged in 2012, the criminal packing of foreigners onto our national voters’ register notwithstanding.

And, by the way, thinking about His Majesty’s “Yenntie Obiara” hip-life orgy with Mr. Mahama tragically reminded me of the 1896 indelible humiliation of Nana Prempeh I by the ragamuffin British Army lieutenant (or was it a captain?) who forced the Asantehene to kiss his boots in execrable show of total surrender to British colonial imperialism. The photograph of this soul-chilling scene was once published in the New York Times’ Book Review. I could not hold back my tears, having also once worked as a security guard, in the mid-1980s, at New York City’s Donnell Library, where some of the original copies of these apocalyptic photographs are kept. And by the way, there is also an Akan stool on display at Donnell.

Whither such political frivolities and abject cynicism, Otumfuo Osei Tutu II? For the sake of an overbilled $29 million “Dys-International” Airport or the Shopping Mall? I fear for the future of Ghana with “dignitaries” like you, Barima Kwaku Duah!