Highlights of the August 18 Abronye Press Confab

When Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia critically and truthfully observes that the one salient difference between his immediate boss, to wit, President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, and the latter’s immediate predecessor lies in the fact that far-reaching national development policy programs and initiatives that leaders of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), such as President John “European Airbus Payola” Dramani Mahama, have since long convinced themselves to be decidedly impossible to achieve, establish or implement are precisely the sort of development program and project challenges that routinely fire up the creative imagination and genius zeal of the proverbial “Little Man from Kyebi” you can bet your bottom-dollar that the former Deputy-Governor of the Bank of Ghana knows exactly what he is talking about.

Actually, the fabled Leprechaun or Little Man with Big Dreams and Ideas for the socioeconomic development and prosperity of the country could aptly reckoned to be the latter-day avatar of the legendary African Show Boy, to wit, the immortalized President Kwame Nkrumah. One striking example of such “NDC Impossibilities,” of course, is the globally lauded and applauded Fee-Free Senior High School Policy Initiative, which the then-President Mahama, in the electorally heated runup to the 2016 Presidential Election, told Ghanaian voters and the totality of the denizens of the African Continent was the cynical and veritable pipedream of a desperately power-hungry politician. What was most remarkable about the Mahama pooh-poohing of the proposed Akufo-Addo Senior High School Policy Initiative was the disdainful critic’s promise or vow that one of the first policy measures that he intended to take, in the highly unlikely event of winning the 2020 Presidential Election, was to thoroughly dismantle this long overdue cultural and intellectual development program that promised to exponentially raise the literacy level and, by this very purpose and objective, the general level of postcolonial Ghanaian civilization in less than a generation.

For an “ironically elitist” President Mahama, a self-proclaimed “Social Democrat,” the humongous cost involved in making public senior high school education readily accessible to each and every qualified Ghanaian citizen and youth, irrespective of ethnicity, class and cultural background, was decidedly an anathema that was also patently unconstitutional. Equally remarkable was Mr. Mahama’s public, if also crudely self-serving, admission that the cost of providing freely accessible Senior High School Education to all able-bodied Ghanaian youths was prohibitive and much too impracticable and unfeasible for any politician to fathom, much less think of implementing. In otherwise, Kwame Gonja wanted Ghanaian voters to believe that he was the more down-to-earth and pragmatic of the two leading candidates in the 2016 Presidential Election.

“Ironically Elitist” because Mr. Mahama belongs to a political party whose leadership claims to be social democratic and studiously oriented towards the needs, interests and aspirations of Ghana’s lumpen poor or socioeconomic underclass. So, the most logical question to ask the democratically, auspiciously and seismically and gloriously ousted former Atta-Mills’ Arch-Lieutenant is precisely how does any progressive leader advance the cause, the needs and the aspirations of his/her society’s most underprivileged citizens and residents by effectively, callously and criminally denying them the same? This is the most salient and most fundamental difference between President Akufo-Addo and the latter’s immediate predecessor, to wit, former President “Akonfem-Kanazoe” Dramani Mahama. You see, for the leadership of the National Democratic Congress, who Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of Ghana (SCOG), Justice Jones M. Dotse once described as having an inordinate and pathological penchant for “Creating, Looting and Sharing” the collective wealth and resources of our beloved country and exclusively dividing it among themselves, the vehicle of government and/or governance solely exists to cater to the needs and interests of society’s most powerful and politically super-privileged.

This is partially what Mr. Kwame Baffoe – aka Abronye DC – the Bono Regional Chairman of the ruling New Patriotic Party, masterfully sought to enlighten Ghanaians about in his Wednesday, August 18, 2021, YouTube videographed Press Conference in Accra. Not altogether unpredictably, having been irrecoverably and irredeemably defeated on the national education and cultural development front, Candidate Mahama would resort to what he shamelessly does best, find faults with the implementational mode of Nana Akufo-Addo’s Fee-Free Senior High School Policy Initiative. He would also sillily and scandalously traipse the length and breadth of the country, claiming to be the better implementer of the very policy initiative that he had initially pooh-poohed as one that was the veritable pipedream of a desperate power-hungry politician. This is a strikingly comical case of the proverbial Mr. Naked (or “Owura Kwaterekwa”) claiming to be a far better fashion designer than the legendary Agya Atta of Asante-Bonwire, the genius Kente-Weaver of my childhood days in Asante-Mampong in the 1960s, or a Dumas wax-print manufacturer.

But, of course, we all know that the man who effectively bungled the John Agyekum-Kufuor-established National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) has absolutely no clue of what he is talking about. As well, Abronye DC recalls the acute disappointment of The Asantehene, Otumfuo Osei-Tutu, II, in the economically critical matter of the reactivation of the globally renowned and celebrated Obuasi Gold Mines or Asante Goldfields, which a then President Mahama had insisted could not be resuscitated, and which had been nominally put up for sale at a diddly $ 1 (USD) – that is, One United States Dollar – without a single buyer stepping up to the plate, as it were, to claim the same, only to have Nana Akufo-Addo raise a half-billion dollars ($ 500,000) in investment capital for the auspicious reactivation of the same. Now, guess what, Dear Reader? Even as I write, Mr. Kwame Baffoe reports that the recently reactivated Asante Goldfields Corporation (AGC) has approximately 5,000 (Five-Thousand) mining employees on its labor roll, with roughly an equal number of new hires being presently trained to join this initial labor pool.

One begins to wonder what really motivated Kwame Gonja to suppose that he actually deserved to be returned to Jubilee House and the Presidency, in order for him to be able to continue to callously and recklessly derail the dreams and aspirations of the overwhelming majority of the good and hardworking people of the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana. God save us from blood-sucking Dracula lookalikes and actalikes like Mr. Mahama and Prof. Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang!