By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
February 3, 2017
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

Let’s be truthful and honest with ourselves – if justice, merit and fair play were prized cultural values integral to what it means to be a Ghanaian, none of the minority members of the Parliamentary Appointments Committee (PAC) would qualify to be put in charge of vetting the cabinet and ministerial appointees of President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo. At any rate, the voting strength of the NDC’s PAC membership is only 38-percent. In other words, the New Patriotic Party’s majority membership on the PAC could do all the vetting of the cabinet appointees, and healthily so, all by themselves.

It is also clear that the likes of Mr. Rashid Pelpuo and Mr. Haruna Iddrisu have absolutely no constructive contribution to make towards facilitating the confirmation of the best and brightest candidates among the pool of nominees put forth by the President. They are all one-trick PAC members with the dubious agenda of bullying those candidates who had been most caustic on the campaign trail against their fallen prime benefactor, namely, President John Dramani Mahama. It appears as if the NDC-PAC members have the bizarre and sole objective of recouping for their former leader something that even the lame-brained Chairman of the so-called Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ) could not cocktail for the Gonja petty chieftain in the unpardonable national contretemps that was the Mahama-Kanazoe Ford Expedition Payola Affair.

But what is even more at once annoying and outrageous is this farcical idea that, somehow, Mr. Mahama had deported himself decently and, perhaps, even “angelically,” while he served as Chief Executive of our august Republic. Was this not the same man who, while on the campaign trail as Interim-President, in the wake of the passing of President John Evans Atta-Mills, the man who made the egregious mistake of selecting Little Dramani as his running-mate, woefully lacked both the requisite sensitivity towards the Mills Family and gratitude as to mordantly castigate the man who courted the ire of the Rawlingses for having made him “a presidential spare tire.” The seriousness of this accusation is two-fold. First, it was made against a man who had tragically passed on under mysterious circumstances, and was thus not in a position to reply his most ungrateful beneficiary. And secondly, accusing his former boss of having made him a spare tire had the immediate impact of fomenting hatred in Ghanaians of northern descent against their southern-descended compatriots, thus creating both ethnic and regional animosity.

What was even more shocking was the deafening silence of his Akan-descended arch-lieutenant, then-Vice-President Kwesi Bekoe Amissah-Arthur, a man whose selection as President Mahama’s Election 2012 running-mate had been singularly predicated on political expediency, to wit, the strategic riving of the country’s Akan ethnic majority in a kind of jujitsu minoritization of Akans against their own best interests and aspirations. I have yet to hear any of the NDC-PAC members call on their former Chief Patron to apologize for cynically desecrating the memory of the man without whose courageous magnanimity, against quite formidable odds, the now-former President John Dramani Mahama would have ended his political career as just another ordinary jaded former cabinet appointee and Member of Parliament.

*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs