By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

President John Dramani Mahama has shown himself to be a mischief-making political chameleon who ought to be promptly shoved off the helm of our national affairs, come December 7, 2012. For instance, anybody who either listened to or read a copy of his closing statement at the end of the second presidential debate, sponsored by the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), clearly noticed that our Caretaker-President absolutely does not deserve a second term in office and must be promptly relieved of his duties, if the present climate of peaceable tension on the country’s political landscape is not to precipitously degenerate into an apocalyptic civil strife in the offing.

In other words, what we are saying here is that Mr. Mahama has a diametrically different reading and understanding of Ghana’s Fourth-Republican Constitution that not only threaten the integrity of our robust, albeit fledgling, democracy and may well plunge us into an irreparably damaging civil war should Ghanaians make another gross judgmental error of returning the patently visionless and resource-wasteful National Democratic Congress to power.

For those of our readers who have not had the opportunity to avail themselves of the same, this is what President Mahama said during the closing segment of the IEA-sponsored second presidential debate: “The NDC government has done a lot in four years. OUR CONSTITUTION GIVES PRESIDENTS TWO TERMS. Take it that I am the spare driver or caretaker. Prof. Mills of blessed memory started the process and I am finishing his unexpired term. I believe the NDC government deserves a second term to be able to build on the foundation that it has laid in these four years. I am certain that Ghanaians will vote for me and turn me from the spare driver that I have been described as into the actual driver leading us to our destination” (See “Turn Me from the ‘Spare Driver’ into Main Driver – Mahama” JoyOnline.com/Ghanaweb.com 11/22/12).

Now, a critical reading of the preceding statement attributed to President John Dramani Mahama renders the same as follows: “Had he not tragically lost his life on July 24, 2012, President John Evans Atta-Mills would have automatically been reelected for a second term in office. This is what the Constitution stipulates.”

Actually, the Constitution only mandates a four-year presidential term. The president, however, has the privilege of putting forth his/her candidacy for a second term of another four years, after which if s/he is successful in his/her reelection bid, the reelected president then permanently proceeds into retirement after his/her second term in office has elapsed or expired. Mind you, the president could also be roundly and permanently voted out of power after serving just one term in office, if the Ghanaian electorate deems the president to be managerially incompetent. The latter case scenario, in essence, is what President Mahama adamantly refuses to accept.

So far, under our Fourth-Republican dispensation, two democratically elected presidents, namely, Messrs. Jeremiah John Rawlings and John Agyekum-Kufuor, have had the privilege of serving two terms of a total 8 years each. Now, the dangerous, deliberate and expedient misreading of the Constitution that Mr. Mahama wants to force down the throats of Ghanaians is to have us converting the fact of Messrs. Rawlings and Kufuor having served as two-term presidents, individually, into a legal precedent or edict, irrespective of how irreparably badly and wastefully the successors of these two gentlemen perform.

The real danger in such mischievous misrepresentation of Ghana’s Fourth-Republican Constitution inheres in the implicit and thinly veiled intention of the former Rawlings communications minister to rule the country for 12 years! To understand the vaulting presidential ambitions of Mr. Mahama, let me explain the preceding further. In essence, what our Caretaker-President is saying here is that since President Atta-Mills died before he could have gone for a second term in office, which Mr. Mahama, rather curiously, claims to be automatically mandated by the Constitution, Ghanaian voters are being asked to elect the former NDC-MP from Bole-Bamboi on December 7, 2012 so as to enable Mr. Mahama to complete the two presidential terms which the latter firmly believes President Atta-Mills ought to have served in office.

What the foregoing means, of course, is that President John Dramani Mahama would then go back to the Ghanaian people to ask for another 8 years in office for himself, for having dutifully and admirably served out the “constitutionally stipulated” 8 years, or two terms, that President Atta-Mills ought to have served but for his unceremonious and abrupt removal from the presidency by an auspicious and divinely ordained act of “Paradigm-Shift,” in the words of Mr. Mahama.

This dangerous trend of thinking is no happenstance, or pure accident, if one recalls the fact that in the lead-up to Election 2012, Mr. Mahama, then in opposition, told his own people in Gonjaland that being in political opposition was the most Satanic of all evils, and that were the National Democratic Congress to be voted back into the seat of governance, he, Mr. Mahama, and his associates had no intention, whatsoever, of dismounting anytime soon. Back then, of course, the now-President Mahama described the Republic of Ghana as a donkey striding across the Sahara desert. This is the President John Dramani Mahama that Ghanaian voters ought to know before entering the polling booth on December 7, 2012. For the future of our country is far more important than the vaulting political ambitions of one loud-talking ethnic and regional chauvinist. Yes, let us fiercely resist this “Constitutional Dictator” in the making!

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is Director of The Sintim-Aboagye Center for Politics and Culture and author of “Ghanaian Politics Today” (Lulu.com, 2008). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net. ###