By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D. English Department, SUNY-Nassau Garden City, New York February 3, 2017 E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

As I have already written in at least one of my previous columns on the subject, while Mr. Kennedy Ohene Agyapong’s impugnation of the chastity of Mrs. Charlotte Osei left much to be desired, it, nevertheless, warranted an investigation if this rather outrageous and slanderous accusation was to be promptly put to rest. That it came from the same source that healthily exposed the Woyome Heist, made the need for a thorough investigation all the more warranted. Of course, Mr. Agyapong would shortly admit that he had made up the story about the EC Chair’s having supposedly secured her strategic transfer from the National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE) to the EC by the provision of sexual favors to President John Dramani Mahama, whose prurience or sexual incontinence, by the way, is a matter of public record and gossip.

I have personally written at least one column caustically carping Mr. Agyapong for fabricating such a scandalous story, knowing fully well that its implications for the husband, family, friends and associates of Mrs. Osei would be nothing short of absolutely devastating. In the aforesaid column, I also vividly remember calling on the Assin-Central New Patriotic Party’s Member of Parliament to consider handsomely compensating Mrs. Osei and the genuinely aggrieved.

If like me and the rest of all well-meaning and truth-loving Ghanaian citizens, Ms. Otiko Afisa Djaba had demanded a thorough investigation of Mr. Agyapong’s inescapably scandalous and slanderous accusation, such demand was absolutely in order, in view of the far-reaching implications that such a liaison, if it really took place, could have on the greater destiny of the country at large. Calling on Ms. Djaba to apologize in exchange for their PAC approval was at once the most lurid tack and the most childish demand to make on the part of the National Democratic Congress’ minority members on the Parliamentary Appointments Committee. Needless to say, the vetting of the Gender, Children and Social Protection Minister-Designate ought to have been squarely based on the fact of whether, indeed, the nominee possessed the relevant and necessary skills and knowledge to perform up to par, and not the decidedly frivolous question of whether Ms. Djaba had made any uncomplimentary remarks against her own cousin and former President Mahama in the heat of the 2016 electioneering campaign.

Which clearly harks back, once again, to the fact that the minority members on the PAC may, after all, not be qualified for the purpose for which they were selected and seated on the PAC. Needless to say, the election has been over for nearly three months now, and yet these NDC apparatchiks are behaving as if the kind of infantile and counterproductive, if also decidedly ineffective, scores-settling petulance is all that they have to contribute to our national development effort for the next four years. If I may unapologetically ask: Can these clowns and cultivated buffoons tell the rest of the nation what they intend to take up next as their parliamentary agenda, once the vetting process is over?

Yes, these NDC-PAC members are a pack of clowns and buffoons, and I make absolutely no apologies for reasserting the same. If, indeed, Ms. Djaba has had occasion to describe then-President Mahama as “a wicked leader, a liar, and a disgrace to the people of The North and he also has the devil’s heart,” what business is it of these sometime Mahama hangers-on? After all, as the first-cousin of the former President, doesn’t Ms. Otiko Djaba know Little Dramani far more intimately than could be said of such political and moral reprobates as Messrs. Rashid Pelpuo, Haruna Iddrisu, Mahama Ayariga and Okudzeto-Ablakwa, among the several NDC-PAC rascals who would rather regress the salutary progress of the country, so as to afford themselves a fighting chance come Election 2020? Come on, come out of your post-election funk, hallucinating dreamers!

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