By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
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??????????? I don?t know that you are any more ?blessed? than the people you claim to be diligently serving, even when your own former Attorney-General and Minister of Justice reveals that had your late boss and immediate predecessor, President John Evans Atta-Mills, not gone the way of all mortals on July 24, 2012, he would have had your moral principles and conduct put under his investigative radar on palpable suspicion of your having possibly committed grievous and massive crimes against the State. The State of Ghana, that is (See ?I?m Undaunted by Insults and Lies Against Me ? Prez Mahama? Ghanaweb.com 10/24/12; also ?Mills Wanted Mahama to be Investigated? Ghanaweb.com 10/22/12).
What the foregoing means is that even our most recent late Chief-of-State and Commander-in-Chief of the Ghana Armed Forces had lost complete trust and confidence in his own arch-lieutenant by the eve of his demise. But even more significantly, this may well explain the adamant refusal of my dear good, old Uncle Tarkwa-Atta to hand over the august reins of governance to his own deputy when it became incontrovertibly evident that President Mills was simply too indisposed and incapacitated to hang onto power. But that the now-President John Dramani Mahama would also heartily celebrate the death of his boss as a divinely ordained changing of the guard, or an auspicious ?Paradigm-Shift,? makes the situation even more direly suspicious and downright dangerous.
Indeed, as of this writing (10/24/12) Vibeghana.com had published a Reuters-generated news report indicating that an autopsy conducted on the remains of the late president at the 37 Military Hospital pointed to the fact of President Mills having been poisoned. Needless to say, we shall in due course examine this latest revelation which strikingly points towards what a sizable percentage of Ghanaians have always suspected, which is that while, indeed, the late president was widely known to be indisposed, nevertheless, the murky, albeit extensive, details pertaining to the circumstances leading to his death are anything but natural.
That the now-President John Dramani Mahama would rather desperately campaign his lungs out in order to hang on to power by hook-or-crook, than nobly allay the suspicions and anxieties of Ghanaians vis-?-vis the circumstances leading to the death of his former boss, seriously undermines the credibility of the former Atta-Mills arch-lieutenant. Indeed, all well-meaning Ghanaians ought to be very worried when the accidental and transitional-president glibly asserts that no amount of ?insults and lies directed at my person by my political opponents will distract me from winning the upcoming election.?
The fact of the matter is that nobody has insulted the person of President Mahama; rather, it is the latter who continues to insult the intelligence of Ghanaian voters and citizens, at large, by flatly and adamantly refusing to publicly and frontally address crucial and constitutionally imperative questions surrounding the death of his immediate predecessor.
It is also virtually pointless to address the annoyingly hollow complaint by Mr. Mahama, regarding the alleged ?insults and lies? supposedly ?directed at my person.? After all, wasn?t it the same Mr. John Dramani Mahama who, in the wake of the tragic demise of President Mills, described Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, his most formidable political opponent and presidential candidate of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), as a decidedly superannuated and senile and doddering old fogey who had absolutely no place, whatsoever, in the New Ghana whose premier Mr. Mahama uniquely epitomized?
*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 ?Selected Political Writings? (Lulu.com, 2008). E-mail: [email protected].
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