Elizabeth Ohene
Veteran journalist and leading New Patriotic Party (NPP) guru, Elizabeth Ohene, has tackled former President John Mahama for always being full of insults, saying “he knows how to insult without even trying.”
She said the former President has the penchant to insult at will and even recently without any provocation attacked a whole ethnic grouping and got away with it.
The former President during his ‘Thank You’ tour in the middle part of the country early in the week, rekindled his abrasive style of political communication and made utterances his opponents said smacks of plain insults, which did not help to shape national cohesion.
When his attention was drawn to some of the unfortunate statements, the former President brushed the issues aside and even said those who did not understand him did not complete schooling.
The veteran journalist, who was once a minister of state during the Kufuor regime and currently the Board Chairperson of SSNIT, said Mr. Mahama cannot continue on that path.
She said in an article that, “Mr. Mahama has shown he is a walking, breathing, and laughing insult.”
She wrote that “according to Mr. Mahama, President Akufo-Addo long ago lost the right to complain about insults because he had insulted and regularly insults people. Mr. Mahama cited as evidence to back his claim that while in opposition, Akufo-Addo had called the then President Atta Mills Dr. Dolittle and since becoming President, he calls his opponents Naysayers and Jeremiahs.”
“Being something of an expert on insults, I have been taking a closer look at these insults. President Mills was called Dr. Dolittle. I start with the literal, obvious meaning of the word, Dolittle. So I break up the offending word; a President was being accused of doing little, he was not busy solving Ghana’s problems,” she said, adding “Since President Mills is sadly no longer with us, one has to be careful and not say anything hurtful about him, but I don’t think a description of little activity during his presidency can be taken as an insult.”
Ms. Ohene said “then it occurred to me that maybe Mr. Mahama was taking the literary reference of Dolittle in George Bernard Shaw’s play ‘Pygmalion’ in which we have the characters of Eliza Dolittle and her father Alfred Dolittle,” adding “Granted that this is a play that premiered in London in 1913, there isn’t much in there to get upset about the Dolittle father and daughter characters.”
She continued that, “President Akufo-Addo calls his critics Naysayers and Jeremiahs. According to the dictionary, a Naysayer is a person who criticises, objects to, or opposes something. The dictionary provides a sentence to illustrate the usage of the word: ‘He continues to win despite the many naysayers’.”
Explaining further, she said, “Akufo-Addo calls his critics Jeremiahs. Here are the meanings of Jeremiah in the dictionary: A major Hebrew prophet of the seventh and sixth centuries and I might add the first name of a former president of the country and a popular first name of many boys since then,” adding “another meaning says: A person who is pessimistic about the present and foresees a calamitous future. Every press conference held by the National Democratic Congress (NDC) in the past three and a half years will qualify to be adjudged as such. I thought this precisely was what Mr. Mahama had been saying. An insult?”
She said that, “Maybe Mr. Mahama is a man of very sensitive disposition and cannot bear what is called the rough and tumble of politics and that is why he regards Dolittle, Naysayer and Jeremiah as insults.”
Akyem Sakawa
She asked, “What about Mr. Mahama’s reaction to the President complaints? Akyem Sakawa. President Akufo-Addo is an Akyem. Elizabeth Ohene is an Ewe. There is no argument,” adding “I go to Google to get this meaning of the word sakawa: a Ghanaian term for illegal practices which combine modern internet-based fraud with African traditionalist rituals. The rituals, which are mostly in the form of sacrifices, are intended to spiritually manipulate victims so that the scammer’s fraud is successful.”
Ms. Ohene asked, “Flag bearer Mahama is happy to cite an ethnic group and bundle them up as people who perform illegal, Internet-based fraud? And these people combine the fraudulent practice with traditional rituals? And this will match Dolittle, boot for boot, to borrow his terminology? Or will Sakawa be on the same wavelength as Jeremiah?”
Previous Attacks
She said “while he was President, Mr. Mahama used to provide the best copy for insults that could be used against him. If someone called Candidate Mahama a dead goat, that would be considered an insult. And if you are looking for an Akyem Sakawa correlation, you should hear Candidate Mahama: ‘when it comes to unleashing violence, no one can beat us to that’.”
She added, “And here was Candidate Mahama in the Volta Region during the voter registration exercise. He said the Volta Region people had been specially targeted for military invasion. Earlier during the 2016 election he had said ‘his northern brothers’ such as Bawumia had no future in the New Patriotic Party (NPP). He knows how to insult without even trying.”
By Ernest Kofi Adu