Opinions of Tuesday, 22 August 2017

Columnist: Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

Valerie Sawyerr may be confused

Dr Valerie Sawyerr Dr Valerie Sawyerr

It is a crying shame that Mr. Harry Sawyerr, the late venerable father of Dr. Valerie Sawyerr, who once worked for Chairman Jerry John Rawlings, is no longer here with us to tell his daughter the grim but factual reality.

Which is that Chairman Rawlings may lack the requisite modicum of integrity ordinarily expected of him by his sometime followers, among them former President John Dramani Mahama, Mr. Johnson Asiedu-Nketia, Dr. Obed Asamoah and, yes, Dr. Valerie Sawyerr.

But the true fact of the matter is that the preceding former servants and disciples and errand boys and girls of Chairman Rawlings ought to have possessed even far less modicum of integrity than their former boss and prime benefactor, and mentor, to have been able to forge an entire generation-long political career under the generous tutelage of the man they now love to hate and revile, the legendary strongman and coup-plotting expert quondam flight-lieutenant of the Ghana Airforce (See “I’m Undeterred By Attacks – Dr. Valerie Sawyerr” MyNewsGh.com / Ghanaweb.com 8/19/17).

It is rather grotesque for Dr. Sawyerr to so facilely presume to have successfully taken on the man who, literally, made her and her brazenly ungrateful gang of Rawlings University graduates and hangers-on what they are today.

The fact of the matter is that none of these desperate and defeated political scam-artists and patent miscreants are any match for the man they so blindly and servilely followed and eked out their thievish livelihood from for some twenty years.

For Dr. Sawyerr, the problem clearly appears to be that Chairman Rawlings has not been criticizing his one-time political punchbag and substantive President of Ghana, to wit, Nana Addo DankwaAkufo-Addo, the way the Founding-Father of the country’s main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) has been going to town on the former President and his longtime protégé.

But this is, no doubt, obviously because the gross incompetence of Mr. Mahama, as President of Ghana, is without compare in recent postcolonial Ghanaian history.

There is also more than ample evidence to show that Mr. Mahama is absolutely no match for Nana Akufo-Addo, in terms of vision, common sense and administrative skills. Somebody should tell Chairman Rawlings’ critics why the Ghanaian-owned banks, which NDC operatives like Mr. Mahama and his former presidential second-bananas, namely, Mr. KwesiBekoeAmissah-Arthur supervised for some ten years, are presently and all of a sudden collapsing left and right.

We all know that the process did not begin only within the last six or seven months. Some of these NDC cynics are even blaming the executive operatives of the country’s central treasury, the Bank of Ghana, for poor oversight of these, in retrospect, mushroom Ghanaian-owned banks, scandalously ignoring the stark fact that it was then-President Mahama and, before the latter, President John Evans Atta-Mills, who constituted the administrative leadership of the Bank of Ghana during the past 9, or so, years and not the now-President Akufo-Addo.

Dr. Sawyerr has so far not been able to credibly and substantively point to any administrative misdeeds that make President Akufo-Addo a less effective and visionary leader than Mr. Mahama.

She and her Amen-Corner Associates only want Chairman Rawlings to blindly support their thoroughgoing corrupt and kleptocratic political agenda. But, you see, dear reader, the average Ghanaian citizen is too savvy to be so easily hoodwinked this time around.

The Mahama rat-pack is as desperate as a maggot-infested log that has been lit at both ends. They know they have no way out of the bottomless sinkhole into which they have dug themselves; and so they have to conjure a scapegoat or a cathartic effigy in the form of Chairman Rawlings to justify and vindicate the sort of wanton political criminality that landed them squarely on the gray margins of opposition political culture where they presently find themselves and have always belonged.