“There is more dangerous menace to civilization than a government of incompetent, corrupt or vile men” – Ludwig Von Mises.
President John Dramani Mahama makes my job as a columnist very easy. His actions and inactions give me room to operate freely. This is a president who has been on an insulting spree for almost eight years and turns around to tell Ghanaians that if insults were medals, NPP followers would have won gold at the Olympics.
There he sat at the Cape Coast sports stadium, giggling, while his hounds, led by the NDC National Organizer, Kofi Adamu went on mad competition to beat each other in an insulting race. Instead of telling their listeners what John Mahama will do when he gets a second chance to rule this nation, they decided to take Nana Addo Dankwa to the cleaners and threw caution to the dogs. The president did like the way his German Sheppard dogs were insulting the standard flagbearer of the NPP and so he saw no reason why he should stop them. By allowing his hatchet men to do the dirty job, the president did not know that he was opening his underbelly for others to hit back.
They say the first method to estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him. If you are a president and you have people like Kofi Adamu who was once suspended from the NDC for being captured on tape, telling somebody that the late Mills will not win the 2012 elections and who helped in no small way to establish Nana Konadu’s National Democratic Party (NDP), Mr. Ofosu Ampofo, an opportunist, Asiedu Nketia, a palm wine tapper’s son, Nii Lamptey Vanderpuye, an upstart in Ghana politics and the others who cannot think beyond their noses, you perform abysmally. No wonder the economy is in tatters.
You see, my dear reader, this particular president has no moral right to advise Ghanaians to avoid insults. He continues to lead his marauding propagandists to insult Ghanaians. Salifu Maase alias Mugabe told Ghanaians that he was flown in to Ghana to work for the president and since the president is the Commander-in-Chief of the Ghana Armed Forces he was not afraid of anyone in Ghana. The nitwit and halfwit turned the heat of insults on Nana Addo, the Okyenhene, and anyone who crossed his way. Even when the National Media Commission invited him following complaints lodged by the NPP, he refused to go and continued with his insults. All along President Mahama enjoyed the Montie programme, after all, as the Commander-In-Chief, was he not the one who commanded him to open fire? Happily, when Corporal Salifu Maase took the fight to the Supreme Court judges, he found himself in jail and begging the Commander-In-Chief to pardon him. If the president has balls between his thighs, he should try and see.
The other day when the president told his listeners at a function that Ghanaians are shortsighted, I could not help but laugh over the statement. If he had said some Ghanaians were forgetful, I would not have any problem with him, but to lump us all together is not acceptable. Yours sincerely do remember all the insults that he heaped on Ghanaians but sadly I will not get enough space in this column to catalogue them. I believe you remember as I do the following insults. He went to the Ashanti Region to meet a section of the NDC at the residency of the Regional Minister and was captured on tape telling his listeners that as for the Ashantis, they are ungrateful because if even you tar their roads with gold, they will still say you have done nothing.
At the same Kumasi when the NDC had their congress and invited Ivor Greenstreet, the CPP flagbearer to give his solidarity message, hell broke loose. Mr. Greenstreet looked into the faces of the NDC people who had gathered at the congress and told them what Ghanaians wanted to tell them. The man said the economy is not doing well and that there are hardships in the country. When the president was called to deliver his speech, he did not spare Mr. Greenstreet. He “unpresidentially” referred to Mr. Greenstreet as a person suffering from incurable myopia. When a president calls his subjects such names then you begin to ask whether the man knows he is a president of a sovereign state.
During the 2012 electioneering campaign Nii Lantei Vanderpuye organized some hooligans to attack Madam Ursula Owusu and some Akans at Odododiodoo and Kennedy Agyapong reacted by asking the Akans to also retaliate. The NDC government caused the arrest of Kennedy Agyapong and slapped some phony charges on him. When an elderly statesman in the person of former president Kufour said what the government did was like killing a fly with a sledgehammer, this was the reply president Mahama gave him: “We will kill the fly with a bulldozer.” Then the NDC government decided to mortgage our oil for the STX housing deal and Ghanaians kicked against the idea. As the debate, whether we should mortgage the oil for the housing deal or not went on, the president looked into our lean faces and told us that it will be foolish for him not to mortgage the oil for the housing deal. That housing project turned out to be a hoax and waste of the nation’s resource.
The same president had cause to refer to criticism of his policies by the minority in parliament as baloney and referred to Ghanaians as people who are not smart enough when businesses started complaining of Dumsor. When savings and loans companies duped Ghanaians and people laid the blame on the doorstep of the government for failing to check these companies since the government and the Bank of Ghana for that matter have an oversight responsibility of these companies, the president told us that even his uncle in Bole who is an illiterate will never put his money in such an investment. He did not know that medical doctors, engineers, businessmen and women, ministers, MMDCEs, military and police officers and a cross section of society invested in the scam. He threw caution to the dogs and told the people of Kyebi, Akufo Addo’s hometown that Kyebi is the headquarters of galamsey. If such a person who has unenviable track record for insulting people comes to tell us that we should stop the insults who will take his advice seriously?
And did I hear Nii Lantei Vanderpuye very well at their Cape Coast campaign launch that no short man or anyone who wears glasses can become the president in Ghana? Just imagine! And this is a person who is a cabinet minister in God’s own country. Since when did height become synonymous with wisdom or ability to rule a country? Let me educate this ignoramus about only two great men who ruled their countries so well but they were not as tall as Mr. Mahama who used his height to misrule Ghana.
President Felix Houphouet Boigny (Le Vieux) won independence for Ivory Coast and ruled the country for thirty three years. During his tenure of office, Ivory Coast became so prosperous that many Ghanaians migrated to that country to work and returned home covered with riches. The man was diminutive but very intelligent. When some African heads of State were calling for war in South Africa in order to wrestle power from the apartheid regime, Boigny was calling for jaw-jaw and tete-a-tete. At the end of the day, South Africa did not go to war but the dream of dismantling Apartheid came to reality. When the Capital town of Ivory Coast, Abidjan experienced congestion, Le Vieux, moved the capital to Yamasoukro and turned Abidjan into a commercial capital.
El Hadj Omar Bongo was also a short man who ruled Gabon for forty-two years until he died in 2009. In fact, he was a short man like his minority Bateke ethnic group. That was why he was nick named “Africa’s Little Big Man” Under his rule, Gabon never had a coup or a civil war, a rare achievement for a nation surrounded by unstable war-torn states. Fueled by oil revenue, Gabon’s economy under Bongo was more like that of an Arab Emirate than a Central Africa nation. Unlike John Mahama, Bongo used the oil revenue to develop Gabon so well that the people of Gabon never had cause to complain. Here we are in Ghana where a tall, huge man is misruling the nation with oil money.
The very day that Nii Lantei Vanderpuye told the world that a person who wears glasses can never be the president of Ghana, Mr. Rawlings was sitting at the Cape Coast stadium, wearing his trade mark medicated glasses. In his revolutionary days, Mr. Rawlings was never seen wearing medicated glasses. He used to wear the type of sunglasses that Mr. Mahama has been wearing in recent times. From time immemorial, many Ghanaians have been wearing medicated glasses due to one problem or the other. People don’t wear medicated glasses as a vogue and so for Vanderpuye to say people who wear medicated glasses can never be president of Ghana, he has insulted millions of Ghanaians. I therefore call on electorates who wear medicated glasses at Odododiodoo, Lantei’s constituency, to vote against him, come December 7. No wonder Mr. Rawlings told the NDC people at Cape Coast that he would not talk much but he was going to wait until Election 2016 is over before he would criss-cross the country to re-organize the party. A word to the wise is in the North (sic!!!)
Eric Bawah