Former President John Mahama
Former President John Mahama can easily pass for a political clown for want of a better description. Some radio stations in a weird way of commemorating the first anniversary of the last epic polls played his voice when in the run-up to the elections he mimicked President Akufo-Addo as he spoke on Peace FM. They also played the ‘NDC comfortable lead’ Koko Anyidohu propaganda.
John Mahama’s love for dramatizing issues such as seeking to paint a picture of a buoyant economy he ostensibly bequeathed his successor President Akufo-Addo is nonsensical when the incumbent administration is encumbered with the task of clearing whopping debts incurred by the latter’s administration.
The ordinary Ghanaian without the slightest knowledge of macroeconomics knows too well the state of the economy at the time Nana Akufo-Addo took over power.
At a time when the ailing economy his successor inherited has just started to respond to treatment, such bunkum of a remark can only be dismissed as mendacious.
When a former President fails to learn from his past follies and continues to bask in lies and watery propaganda, he presents himself for verbal maltreatment from victims of his bad economic policies and open pillaging of the public kitty.
Little wonder when he unashamedly claimed the economy was in the best of shapes at the point of his exit from the highest office of the land, most people who heard him wondered whether he was not inebriated or just being politically mischievous.
Perhaps he only sought to insult the intelligence of the people of this country as he often does by making such inferences. Ghanaians are not victims of amnesia as he sought to suggest when he was at his foulest in his remarks about national affairs as President.
Ghana under his watch suffered some of her most telling moments in her economic history comparable only to the PNDC junta days. Doing propaganda with the economy is not sustainable as sooner or later the truth will come out.
One does not have to be rocket science savvy to discern how bad things had degenerated under John Mahama. The economy which at the time the late President John Evans Atta Mills inherited the reins of power was posting 14% growth courtesy the oil impetus, slumped to 3.7% under him. And what is he is telling his compatriots?
Economic growth and retrogression is a scientific exercise determined by variables and not about film star gestures on the campaign trail.
How can an economy which was deflated by three-years of irritating power outages resulting in companies relocating to other parts of the sub-region be wholesome as the former President wants us to believe? If he seeks to inject humour into his remarks let him avoid such sensitive subjects as the economy whose mismanagement by him led to massive unemployment and even avoidable deaths of course.
Memories of his boastful promise of not turning to the IMF for a bailout and how he reversed this pledge are still fresh in our minds. Such a man was bound to suffer the rejection of Ghanaians as they did at the polls of last year.
Let him shut up if he has nothing to tell us in the form of an apology for causing us to endure the painful economic tribulations of his tenure as president.
Such nonsense about a varied picture of Ghana under his watch is an insult we would not countenance.