By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
July 20, 2014
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

I heard about this rumor quite awhile back but did not deem it to be worthy of any serious attention. It was not because I did not believe that it contained any iota of truth and/or credibility. Largely that any fetching social status of such cynosure was also highly likely to court the raw envy and the jealousy of the proverbial average Ghanaian. I must also quickly point out that this is a universal human trait.

The problem one has in accepting Alhaji Mumuni Saaka Adam's version of the truth of whether, indeed, Ghana's first lady, Mrs. Lordina Mahama, has been pestering ministerial appointees for favors is that the gripers, or complainants, appear to be too many for anybody to lightly brush off as liars (See "Lordina Mahama Will Never Interfere With the Work of Government Functionaries" Modernghana.com 7/12/14).

The article in reference does not specifically articulate the nature of the favors that the first lady is widely alleged to have been pressuring cabinet appointees and other highly placed government appointees for; but we know from reliable sources that they have absolutely nothing adulterous about them. The president and his wife appear to be as madly in love with each other as they have been since the power-couple set eyes on one another. Rather, we have been reliably informed that the alleged "first-lady favors" are purely political and of the sort that have been part and parcel of corrupt governments since the regime of the Nkrumah-led Convention People's Party (CPP).

Maj-Gen. Ocran, if memory serves me accurately, systematically details several instances of such unorthodox favors in his book and version of the 1966 National Liberation Council (NLC) putsch that auspiciously ousted President Nkrumah's one-party dictatorship in the country. In polite company such favors, as widely alleged against Mrs. Mahama, are categorized as "Nepotism." We know a lot of it exists in the Mahama government. But so was it rife in the relatively more progressive government of the Kufuor-led New Patriotic Party (NPP). President Kufuor was even widely known to have impudently acknowledged, and some say even solemnly "baptized" abject corruption in government, as a bona fide human trait ordained by Divine Providence since the Biblical creation of Adam and Eve, our proverbial primal pair.

At any rate, it used to be widely alleged that the overwhelming majority of Kufuor cabinet appointees were Akan. Interestingly and paradoxically, many of the Akan staunch supporters of the Kufuor administration themselves claimed that the Kufuor cabinet strikingly resembled a closed emergency session of the Asanteman Council, as opposed to a plenary session of the same.

Still, what makes the allegations levelled against Mrs. Mahama quite troubling is that so emotionally harrowing have the purportedly importunate pressures she has, allegedly, been putting on her husband's key employees become that a remarkable number of them are reported to be threatening to abandon ship. Now, we cannot invest much capital in these allegations, other than to simply echo the age-old maxim that "There is no smoke without fire," for no specific names and/or ballpark figures have been provided by the first lady's largely faceless critics.

Like the wife of Ghana's longest-ruling dictator-cum-elected premier, Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings, who runs a commercially scandalous political organization called the 31st December Women's Movement (DWM), Mrs. Mahama runs an eponymous non-governmental charitable organization. If memory serves yours truly accurately, the Lordina Mahama Foundation regularly solicits healthcare supplies in the form of medications and medical equipment from abroad, largely from the United States, and selectively distributes them to hospitals and health centers largely located in the electoral strongholds of the ruling party, the National Democratic Congress.

Sometimes, especially during the electioneering campaign season, one gets the quite credible impression that the Lordina Mahama Foundation is effectively the "charitable wing" of the Mahama-for-President campaign. On the latter score, the L(M)F strikingly resembles Mrs. Agyeman-Rawlings' DWM. But that is about the deepest extent of such comparison. For unlike the DWM, which has been chronically mired in grand larceny, the LF appears genuinely to be the metaphorical baby of just one rich and highly placed woman's modest contribution to our national healthcare development efforts.

But whether her efforts have been selflessly remarkable and non-political in reach, squarely lies outside the purview of this column. One reality, though, may remarkably be on the side of Mrs. Mahama. And it is the fact that as of this writing (7/20/14), no ministerial appointee had been reported to have voluntarily resigned his/her job on grounds of the first lady's having inordinately pressured the concerned individual, ad nauseam, for what may be aptly termed as nepotistic favors. Almost all the cabinet appointees in the Mahama government who have vacated their positions, so far, have done so involuntarily. The posssession of power and influence in this rag-tag government must be sweet, indeed.

The other side of reality that is not in favor of President Mahama is the fact that contrary to what Alhaji Mumuni Saaka Adam, the first lady's aide, would have Ghanaians believe, "The President is not doing well for the country. And the best we can do as good and responsible citizens is to vote him out of the Flagstaff House and replace him with a more capable leader."

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