GHANA ELECTION 2024: The Clash of Pampered Dynastic Scions.
“If you do not know where you want to go, it doesn't matter which path you take.” - Lewis Caroll.
The great scientist Albert Einstein was said to have defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over, and yet expecting to have different results. We can say that with the twin Albatrosses of Western-styled democracy and foreign religions turning them into unthinking, uncritical zombies, Africans richly deserve their position as the Wretched of the Earth.
A people with the faculties to think and ask questions would not only have interrogated their brains and asked where they went wrong to land where they are, but they would have questioned their sanity in ritually electing the same cabal of otiose, self-indulging, visionless, and unpatriotic elite and expecting their lot to be improved.
Any intelligent African would have asked why imported systems that failed in their home countries were expected to work in Africa.
Europeans have long removed gods and goblins of the sky from their daily lives and banished them from their national affairs. Many of the churches in Europe have been converted into pubs and other things. Yet, like the new converts who make the worst zealots, Africans continue to convert every available space into a church without the intelligence to ask themselves why people who denied them visas to visit their garden (as the EU top diplomat Borell defined Europe) will sail over oceans to come and tell them about a paradise.
The same lack of critical thinking faculties made it impossible for Africans to ask why democracy, which has become shambolic in both the US and Europe, will somehow work in Africa. Coming home to Ghana, how do the compatriots of the acclaimed Kwame Nkrumah hope to achieve economic development when they keep on electing the same failed, recycled politicians and their heirs?
Ghana is supposed to be a multiparty democracy, but to all intent and purposes, the country is a two-party state with both the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the National Democratic Congress (NDC) turning the country’s governance system into a musical chair of rolling corruption and incompetence.
Yet, some citizens continue to be bamboozled and mesmerized by the antics of their corrupt overlords.
Not only that, the two gladiators in the December 2024 presidential elections are children of former ministers. Talk of political dynasties.
John Mahama: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Mahama
A member of the Gonja ethnic group in the Savanna Region of Ghana, Mahama hails from Bole in the Savanna Region. Mahama was born on Saturday, November 29, 1958, in Damongo, an area in present-day West Gonja District. His father, Emmanuel Adama Mahama, a wealthy rice farmer and teacher, was the first Member of Parliament for the West Gonja constituency and the first Regional Commissioner of the Northern Region during the First Republic under Ghana's first president, Kwame Nkrumah. Mahama's father also served as a senior presidential advisor during Ghana's Third Republic under Hilla Limann who was overthrown in 1981 by Jerry Rawlings.
After completing his undergraduate education, Mahama taught history at the secondary school level for a few years.[8] Upon his return to Ghana after studying in Moscow, he worked as the Information, Culture, and Research Officer at the Embassy of Japan in Accra between 1991 and 1995.[9] From there he moved to the anti-poverty non-governmental organization (NGO) Plan International's Ghana Country Office, where he worked as International Relations, Sponsorship Communications, and Grants Manager between 1995 and 1996.[7] In 1993, he participated in a professional training course for Overseas Public Relations Staff, organized by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Tokyo. He also participated in a management development course organized by Plan International (RESA) in Nairobi, Kenya.
John Mahama’s blog at https://www.johnmahama.org contains few contents apart from sleep-inducing propaganda, not even the quality type.
Bawumia’s Wikipedia entry is lenghtier. From it, we glean that his father was a top political honcho from the Northern part of Ghana and was an MP, a Minister, and an Ambassador.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahamudu_Bawumia
Bawumia was born on Monday, 7 October 1963 in Tamale, Ghana to Alhaji Mumuni Bawumia and Hajia Mariama Bawumia.
Bawumia's father, Alhaji Mumuni Bawumia was a teacher, lawyer, and politician, a Mamprugu Royal, and Chief of the Kpariga Traditional Area at the time of his death in September 2002.
He was a founding member of the Northern Peoples' Party alongside Chief S. D. Dombo, Chief Abeifa Karbo, Yakubu Tali, the Tolon Naa, and J. A. Braimah, Kabachewura.
The Northern Peoples Party, together with the National Liberation Movement and other opposition political parties, later merged into the United Party, the forebear of the current New Patriotic Party.
Alhaji Bawumia served under various Ghanaian governments in various capacities, including as a member of the Northern Territories Council, the Gold Coast Legislative Assembly, a Member of Parliament of the First Republic, Northern Regional Minister, and Ambassador to Saudi Arabia.
Alhaji Bawumia was awarded the high national honor of Member of the Order of the Star of Ghana in March 1999. He served as chairman of the Council of State, under the presidency of J. J. Rawlings from 1993 to 2000 in the 4th Republic.[25][26]
In September 2021, his mother, Hajia Mariama Bawumia, died in Accra, at age 81, and was buried later beside her husband in Kperiga, near Walewale in the Northeast Region.
Now, this is what started my rant.
"Greetings, Femi. It has been a long while. Where have you been?
I am around. Greetings, back.
Please, I called to ask if you are as excited as most Ghanaians at the candidates put forward by the two major parties with any chance of a stab at the presidency in the 2024 elections.
Are Ghanaians excited?
You bet that they are. Are you not?
Hmmmmmmm.
Would you care to elaborate, please?
There is not much to elaborate on. If Ghanaians are indeed excited by the candidacies of Mahama and Bawumia, what can I say but wish them well and hope that they realize that they are part and parcel of the rot that consigned a once-promising nation into an underdevelopment quagmire?
With the experience that both men have gathered over the years, don’t you think that they both pack enough wallop to sail the country’s ship into greater shores?
Wow! What do we have here but the apparent triumph of optimism over experience? What experience do you talk about exactly? What experience do Mahama and Bawumia boast about when the nation remains mired in Dickensian underdevelopment? As VPs and presidents, both men have ruled (make that misrule) Ghana for close to 16 years. How long does it take to give citizens pipe-borne water and steady electricity? It is sad that, despite all our lamentations about how bad things are, we as citizens failed to raise our own game. Not only do we not make it our business to ask questions of those who govern us, but we spend our time condemning the few among us who dare to raise their voices. Here you are talking about the experiences of the presidential candidates, but did you ask yourself the simple question if you will hire either man to run the affairs of your company? Apart from being born with and fed with golden spoons in their gilded elite families, what experience recommended Bawumia and Mahama for the highest office in the land? Mahama holds a degree and experience in communications and teaching. Bawumia brandishes a Ph.D. in Economics and experience in central bank banking. Neither of them has successfully run any enterprise; not to cast doubt on their capabilities. The highest achievement of Mahama, before he plunged into politics, was to head an NGO. Bawumia was an economic theoretician, and we know how far from reality those folks are. Apart from bare-faced lying and spewing empty partisan sloganeering, neither man has put forward any utterance that we can consider philosophic or thought-provoking. Neither of them has articulated any thoughtful statements that we can sit and ruminate and ponder over. Honestly, the question that popped into my mind after watching Bawumia is: How did this one get his PhD? So infantile and kindergarten are his utterances that one is hard-pressed to imagine that the man saw the inside of a university. Both men are dull, insipid, and uninspiring.
It is said that the key to solving a problem is to understand it. Do you think that both Mahama and Bawumnia who have led a sheltered and pampered life, with absolutely no connection to the realities of the lives of ordinary Ghanaians are capable of providing the necessary solutions? Or, do you argue that the men who have never slept in darkness in their entire lives, or have their taps empty for weeks can understand the harshness experienced by citizens who walked kilometers every day with their Kufuor gallons in search of water, or that they will somehow have solutions to acute water shortages?
To be honest with you, the very fact that the political elite put these two men up as their presidential candidates only shows the depth of their utter contempt for the people of this country. In a sane country, both Bawumia and Mahama will be too ashamed to show their ugly (I don’t mean that in the Beauty Contest context) faces in public, much less gallivanting around the land, telling the same stupid and vapid lies that have grounded us where we are today. Without the corruption and incompetence of John Mahama, Ghana would have been spared the nightmare of the Akufo-Addo & Bawumia regime.
That is a rather harsh indictment.
I can only reply to you with this quote from one of my intellectual mentors, Frederick Douglass: “O! Had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.” That we have men like Mahama and Bawumia defacing our landscapes with their posters, deafening our ears with their stupid lies only demonstrates that they have no regard whatsoever to us as sentient beings who are capable of using our brains. We should feel shame that our intelligence is assaulted with the same lies by the same people!
Ritualistically, every four years, the elite pantomime to us the charade that we have a say in whom they choose to guide the affairs of the republic. And we stupidly follow and dance to the same outdated scripts as the simpletons that we are. And we pretend not to know why things continue to deteriorate in the land.
Ghanaians certainly deserve the hell they are consigned by their elite if out of their 30+ million population, they can find no better candidates to contest the presidency than two arrogant, spoilt, entitled, and corrupt scions of political families who have been misruling them and mismanaging their national affairs since the dawn of the history of the republic!
Have a New Year, if you will.
©️Fẹ̀mi Akọ̀mọ̀làfẹ̀
December 25, 2023
Fẹmi Akọmọlafẹ is a farmer, writer, and published author.
My latest book, “Africa: A Continent on Bended Knees,” is available on:
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Africa: It shall be well: https://tinyurl.com/sn64ocd
Africa: Destroyed by the gods: https://tinyurl.com/vglfk7w
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Comradely,
Fẹ̀mi Akọ̀mọ̀làfẹ̀