Ametor Quarmyne Knows Where His Bread Is Buttered

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Jan. 10, 2015
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

As Dr. J. B. Danquah once told then-President Kwame Nkrumah, in the realm of human civilization, development is measured by the extent of one's freedom to develop one's mind and creative capacity and imagination; and then basic material aspects of life like architectural landmarks and/or buildings may be aptly envisaged as salutary cultural complements. In other words, what makes life worth living is the degree of individual liberty and one's ability to effectively realize one's creative capacity, via entrepreneurial encouragement and/or support from the established leadership.

In the preceding respect, President Nkrumah, as incontrovertibly attested by Nigeria's President Nnamdi Azikiwe and Kenya's Professor Ali A. Mazrui, to name but just a couple of the most distinguished African leaders, was woefully wanting. For his part, the recently deceased Professor Mazrui described President Nkrumah, paradoxically, as a great African who was, nevertheless, a very bad leader of his own country. And, of course, like Dr. Azikiwe, Professor Mazrui's assessment of President Nkrumah's greatness or otherwise was squarely predicated on the extent to which the Show Boy's tenure relatively enhanced or detracted from the civil liberties and creative and entrepreneurial freedoms of Ghanaians.

For President Azikiwe, a phenomenal media giant and pioneer and erudite public intellectual in twentieth-century Africa, the extortionate political leadership of President Nkrumah grossly undermined the significance of the anti-colonial struggle (See Azikiwe's Eulogy In Memory of Dr. J. B. Danquah). Well, I would not blame a bread-and-butter National Democratic Congress (NDC) operative like Mr. Eric Ametor Quarmyne, because it is quite clear that the so-called Communications Consultant to the National Health Insurance Authority (NHIA) does not know what he is talking about, when he scandalously asserts that "none of Ghana's presidents can be compared to Kwame Nkrumah[,] except incumbent [President] John Dramani Mahama (See "Mahama Is Next to Dr. Kwame Nkrumah... - Ametor Quarmyne" Peacefmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 1/9/15).

The first irony here, of course, is the fact that Mr. Quarmyne makes his living consulting for a health insurance agency and system that was established by President John Agyekum-Kufuor, a veritable scion of the Danquah-Busia-Dombo ideological tradition, and not by either President Nkrumah or President Mahama. As for Mr. Quarmyne's claim that President Mahama has constructed 200 senior high schools, the record ought to be there for all Ghanaians to see. He ought not be the one telling Ghanaians about such purported achievement, if it really exists outside of Mr. Quarmyne's obviously hallucinatory imagination. Let him publish the list and names of these Mahama-constructed senior high schools, and then we can begin a vigorous debate on the same.

You see, it is one thing to put up architectural structures and give them any names one chooses; it is quite another, altogether, practically proving that, indeed, these structures are actually functioning in exactly the way and manner that they are supposed to. Well, nobody is really saying that Mr. Mahama has not done anything for the country, if only precipitously causing the decline of Ghana's economy, healthcare system and academic standards, among a plethora of other sectors of national endeavor, could be proudly chalked off as positive achievements.

Indeed, I have firmly maintained, elsewhere in one of my previous columns, that the one salient difference between former President Kufuor and President Mahama is that whereas President Kufuor spent the temporal bulk of his tenure reforming the country's economy, President Mahama has been studiously going about the criminally regressive mission of unravelling the same. It started with the wanton wastage of the country's economic resources for his 2012 hawkish grab for power.

______________________________________________________________