Trotting On Into 2024 With the Hezbollahs, Houthis and Hamases

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August 5, 2024
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Four months into what we have often tended to describe as ‘critical’ or ‘crucial’ elections, as if no election in Ghana is crucial and critical, the temperature of the politician and their political parties continue to up in frenzied contest, but also unfriendly jibes.

From the law courts of the country, through the flagbearers’ engagements of constituencies in the Savannah, and down to irritating flashpoints in Mahama Ayariga’s Bawku and conflict-riddled Lukula, the sparks and barbs pervade the atmosphere – with noises that are not only prankish, but sometimes loose-ended and infantile.

Particularly, since Hawa Yakubu tutored us about the issues, and helped introduce niche messages that Jake and Oboshie Sai-Cofie would be jingling to the discomfort of the Jerry Rawlings corner, all we are seeing today, generally, is plenty of twaddle that crowds out the deft digitisation and 24-hour economy messages from the two flagbearers. But that is the nature of the ‘madding crowd’ politics that we love to offer the madding, unlettered electorate, Okada economy actors and jobless youth interested more in seeking greener pastures as cleaners and house-helps in Dubai than being mechanics and plumbers in Ghana.

Unfortunately as a nation, we may not have done modestly enough, in creating jobs that the politician himself would be proud of. But that has been because, by their long mouths, they pretend to know how to do anything, when the Constitution stipulates only a few, manageable things for them.

If they had not altogether been too satisfactory at creating jobs, it was because they themselves failed to appreciate that job creation comes essentially from competence, capacity and ability to generate frameworks, systems and structures to facilitate and accelerate job creation naturally. But that is the cross they have elected to bear…So, let them bear it, while we hassle them for being ‘ambitious’ and ‘magnanimous.’

Invitation to more noise

While we filter the ambitious and the magnanimous from the naked twaddle, the Electoral Commission (EC), sounding more and more democratic and inclusive, has, with the knowledge and consent of the political parties, decided that from September 9 to September 13, this year, it will receive nominations for the elections of President and Members of Parliament (MPs).

This decision is pursuant to Regulations 6, 7 and 8 of the Public Elections Regulations, 2020 (C.I. 127). The EC, however, has generously maintained that filing fees are same as that for the last 2020 elections, affirming that presidential candidates will pay GH¢100,000 and parliamentary GH¢10,000, despite inflation levels and rising costs of providing services.

Deputy Chairman in-charge of Operations, Samuel Tettey, said interested candidates were required to download the nomination forms from the EC’s website at https://ec.gov.gh/forms pronto. All prospective candidates should therefore contact the Commission for a passcode.

PNC Red Beret kid’s bid

So murky will be the terrain, with mavericks such as PNC’s Bernard Monah seeking space to fly the PNC flag as a presidential candidate. But that’s democracy. Very soon, my Assemblyman from Adobetor Electoral Area will also be wigging through the crowd like a Zacchaeus seeking recognition to become a disciple in the days that being Jew and a proxy of the Roman Empire was a passport to safety.

So, we would, like last year, be fielding a dozen or so presidential candidates, probably with Akua Donkor and the other known and unknown quantities clowning and clamouring for space and the hearts, souls and ears of the junkies at Adabraka, Kinbu and Asylum Down, the haven of 24-hour economy in drug abuse and black market activity.

Bernard launched his nokofioo bid to become a presidential candidate of the party whose presidential candidate dazzled Jerry Rawlings in 1996, though the charismatic Nkrumaist and medical practitioner would fizzle out prematurely as a politician or merit, after spurning an invitation earlier from the NPP to become JAK’s running mate – with massive prospects of becoming a President in 2008.

Monah’s vision

In a feuding political team that represents your country of the blind and one-eyed men, Bernard Mornah will be launching that bid to lead PNC for Dec. 7 polls to offer some magic. His vision will be to “create a Ghana where everyone, including the youth and women, can achieve their full potential.” He may be right. This is Ghana, where everything is possible.

Says he: “I aim to provide decent work opportunities, both in private and public sectors, and ensure that Ghanaians do not feel the need to seek opportunities abroad.” He, Bernard, is committed to honesty, discipline and excellence as personal values.

His ‘rich’ credentials include being the national youth organiser and General Secretary. Priorities are addressing high levels of unemployment, inflation, exchange rate crisis, corruption, gross mismanagement of the economy, the double-track system in public schools and abuse of office by the incumbent government as some of the problems facing the country, which should encourage voters to seek change.

When a General beats a retreat.

As the grounds generate bubble upon bubble, lawyers for a former Auditor-General, Prof Dua Agyeman, are on the heels of the NDC’s General now elevated to National Chairman of the opposition NDC in the GH¢20m defamation case against Johnson Asiedu Nketiah.

According to the lawyers of the aggrieved and angry former Auditor-General, despite claims and an official excuse, that the General was medically indisposed and couldn’t be present in court to defend himself against a defamation case, he had been spotted still doing his things on NDC campaign platforms.

Also cited in the case were Neat FM and your authoritative Daily Graphic, who we never thought would ‘dabble’ in such stories by their conservative and defensive tradition.

Professor Dua Agyeman has sued Mr Nketiah for claiming that he (Prof. Agyeman) generated fake audit reports resulting in him being sacked by the Institute of Chartered Accountants Ghana.

Remember Asiedu Nketia of 2008. He accused JAK of everything, probably including attempting to incinerate the throne of Almighty God. Nobody took him to court. It was an allowable campaign cacophony. He got away with it, and the NDC made enough capital from it to win the elections, without Rambo Gbevlo-Lartey prosecuting successfully one cat or mouse, after the NDC came to power.

But the retreating General reminds of Kojo Sardine, and an episode between him and an uncle mine. Kojo was eccentric businessman Nii Yemo’s dad. Nii Yemo was a buddy of Jake and Jake was a buddy of my buddy Mike Soussoudis, Papa J’s cousin.

It was only Nii Yemo from La who successfully made nonsense of Jerry Rawlings confiscation spree by dragging the regime to court to nullify charges against the dad and retrieve his assets while sons and daughters of known Kwahu and Ashanti business captains hid and whined and bolted into exile.

But this my uncle had a penchant for embarrassing businessman Kojo Sardine anytime he saw him on his way to work in his three-seater Mercedes: they are no longer in town, but in the 60s into the early 70s, only a few rode in that classy toy. Every rich man is a thief in Ghana…That was my uncle’s verdict.

And my uncle would shout Kojo Julor – until one day, he got out of the toy, and chassed my paternal uncle to my maternal grandmothers compound – while my uncle, agitated, got drenched in sweat, desperately seeking asylum between my grandmother’s laps.

Possessed by Lawyer Ayikoi Otoo’s gbeshie, the spirit that turns fingerlings into giants, Asiedu Nketia would do to the former Auditor-General what he did to JAK and got away with it. And now, the court is after him.

But the judge says nyet. You have to prove that Asiedu Nketia is not only sick, but that you actually have evidence that he is out there seeking safety in the NDC flagbearer’s laps like my caged uncle did. It is not enough to allege…“Bring the evidence of him hopping from one NDC rally to the other…”

Fortunately for Asiedu Nketia, the defamation law today is no longer what we had under his benefactor Jerry Rawlings under which poor George Naykene got arrested, jailed and subsequently died, after his release – with Major Mensah Gbedemah as witness threatening to blow Ndebugre’s head with a pistol in court, and got away with it…

That is why both the General and the plaintiff’s lawyers must play by the rules, and prove their respective points.

By Abena Baawuah

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Opinion

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August 25, 2024
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3 minutes Read

A Tale of two men

Herein is a tale of two men aspiring the highest office of a country. They’re both asking the citizens of the country to entrust in their hands, the affair of a country.

The country is Ghana, a country that was doing well until the global pandemic struck. Even before it could get out of the hardships imposed on the world by the pandemic, another war happened, disrupting global supply chains and impacting negatively global economies, both large and small.

Ghana, just like the rest of the world, is still reeling under the catastrophic impact of these 2 exogenous factors. But, the economy seems to be picking up, and there are some signs of positivity.

Both men have had stints at the seat of government. The first one, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia has been vice president for the past 8 years, and his opponent, the other gentleman John Framani Mahama who was once the vice president for 4 years 7 months, and later president for 4 years, 5 months.

THE PROBLEM:

The country is still trying to get out of the economic doldrums imposed by the war and the pandemic and it needs a leader with the requisite competence and discipline to steer itself out of the turbulent waters. We will look at the 2 men, their background, expertise, track record as vice presidents since Bawumia has not been president yet, and then the country can to decide.

CANDIDATE 1: Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia (DMB), 60 years of age.

Education :

BSc. Economics, University of Buckingham

MSc. Economics, Lincoln College, Oxford University

PhD. Economics, Simon Fraser University, Canada.

Certificate in Banking, the Chartered Institute of Bankers Diploma (ACIB), UK.

Areas of Expertise: Macroeconomics, International Economics, Development Economics, Monetary Policy, Finance, Banking, Digitalization/Digitization as a tool for economic development.

Professional Experience ( Non-Political):

1. Lecturer in Monetary Economics and International Finance Emile Woolf College of Accountancy.

2. Assistant Professor of Economics, Baylor University, Texas, USA.

3. Economist/Researcher, IMF, Washington DC, U.S.A.

4. Deputy Governor, Bank of Ghana

5. Appointed Fellow of the International Growth Centre (IGC), a research institute based jointly at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Oxford University

6. Senior Research Associate at the Centre for the Study of African Economies at the Department of Economics, University of Oxford.

7. Resident Representative of the African Development Bank for Zimbabwe

Achievements and Initiatives led as Vice President:

1. Ghana Card as a unique ID card

2. Ghana card as travel document

3. Developmental projects across Zongo under ZoDF

4. Medical drone services

5. Digitization of ECG

5. Mobile money/bank interoperability

6. No guarantor student loan

7. Sinohydro Projects

8. Kumasi Airport

9. Kumasi central market

10. Tamale airport

11. Gold for oil/BoG domestic good purchase programme.

12. Agenda 111

13. TVET focus education

14. Digital address system

15. Free Wi-Fi for schools, etc.

CANDIDATE 2: John Dramani Magam (JM), 65 years.

EDUCATION:

1. BA. History, University of Ghana.

2. Post Graduate Diploma in Communications studies, University of Ghana.

3. MA Social Psychology, Institute of Social Sciences in Moscow, Russia.

Areas of Expertise: Not sure

Professional Experience (Non-Political):

1. History Teacher, SHS Level

2. Information, Culture and Research Officer at the Embassy of Japan in Accra

3. International Relations, Sponsorship Communications and Grants Manager, Plan International’s Ghana Country Office (NGO).

Achievements as Vice President:

1. Led the purchase of Airbus aircraft for the Ghana Air Force.

For a country in the process of recovering from the war and the pandemic, without any biases, looking at the two candidates, who would you rather elect to manage the affairs of the country.

Columnist

Opinion

goldcoastnewsline@gmail.com
July 15, 2024
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7 minutes Read

Napo’s uppercut that made Otumfuo’s jaws drop

If we think politicians cannot play the prank, we are being simply naïve…And if Adam could not protect himself in the Garden of Eden setting, what would a wooden head son do? So, the animal in Cain, father of the Chinese, showed.

That animal retorted in the face of God: Am I my brother’s keeper?

Earlier, God had warned him, saying “Cain, evil is at your door”. He laughed. “What is evil?” In that, he pirated Pilate, who asked Jesus: “What is Truth?”

Jesus would later warn Judas: “You, you will sell me for Roman coins…”

But Judas, like Cain, ignored the import of the message.

But my gripe this week is not about Cain, Judas, Pilate or pirates; or, for that matter, Napo and Emperor Napoleon, who responded, in clenched fists, to his inquiring Ministers when he was asked to put the State first in a matter about his craze for war.

“The state?” Napoleon had retorted: “I am the State.” “L’état? C’est moi” That’s the French version, for those of you who decided to dodge French classes because it sounded like romance between a Romeo and Juliet. But that has been the sin of the sons of Adam, particularly the African politician.

It is in our blood

If we blame Napo for the uppercut on the chin of the Otumfuo, we must go back to the Bible, and start from KA Busia, through Kutu Acheampong to Rawlings, JAK, JM, Old Boy Billy…I won’t smack JEAM, however, over his Dze W Fie Asem because we know this was a poor, harmless “sad, old padre” engaging in humour.

When Lawyer Nii Ayikoi Otoo told Justices of the Supreme Court during the infamous Election 2012 Petition that there is a demone [feminine French for demon] in every politician, the ace Ga lawyer knew exactly what he was saying, though it was no excuse for his political fingerling and Journalist, for that matter, to poke a Justices of the Supreme Court.

It appears that from entertainment, including football and boxing, to administration and conduct in business life, everything for the Ghanaian, even including taking penalties, has been sweat. The grace of people or personalities conducting or completing or committing to excellence in public state organizational and personal lives is becoming a missing link in our aspiration and desire for excellence.

That’s how come we have military officers just graduating hallucinating about being Presidents in April 1967. But that was also why we had a team that had worked out programmes with the British Colonial government being jettisoned by one man’s plot to become head of the pack when a beautiful cooperation was already in place for national independence. But, again, that is an academic argument.

So, we came to have Assemblymen and Assemblywomen who saw nothing wrong with attempting to fight MPs already ensconced in their constituencies, just to leap to the next stage – lettered or unlettered. On and on, we began to have MMDCEs also plotting to remove MPs – both in the opposition party or the ruling administration in all the tenures.

It has been a whole cycle of stress, sweat, attrition, dog eat dog and crabs-in-a-bucket culture…for us as a nation.

Records

Again, I won’t touch Kwame Nkrumah. As a cornered rat, he must have had reason for skewing political power for political profit. Being in a situation that a cat finds itself from a cat-eating community, he must be awake 24 hours a day in a 24-hour state economy and other businesses of state to perform and enjoy his tenure…He had hopped atop a tiger, and he must evermore live with that risk.

And I suspect he knew, like Idi Amin or Sanni ‘The Butcher’ Abatcha, that it could not be forever in Flagstaff House or Aso Rock.

So, we would be also having Methodist, Christian, educated academic Dr KA Busia. And the records are that he was so vehement over previous appointees that he became infamous for his verbal excesses in a case that he lost in the Supreme Court called Apollo Koomini…

He was strident and shrill over that urge to defrock Kwame Nkrumah’s bureaucrats and technocrats.

It was as if those people had raped his mother. Yet, there were raging issues that should have drawn more sweat and stress for the cameras and GBC, VOA or BBC and Deutsche Welle newsrooms.

Kutu, too, who griped during KA Busia’s tenure would be ignoring calls from the Bar Association and Professional Bodies Association of Ghana to throw jibes at students who parents in rural communities were educating from palm oil sales.

Hilla Limann was one of the most harmless Presidents Ghana would ever had; and to think that he was chosen tactically by the People’s National Party (PNP) as a compromise candidate in uniting the nation with a Parliament that would be Ghanaian and alive to its duties…

But, what about cousins Jerry Rawlings and Courage Quarshigah doing it to themselves and the Panins and Kakra Essamuahs; or Sekondi lawyers from NPP and NDC calling each other names, with the NDC chap citing the then NPP opposition as rats. Kusie…It is, I insist, in our genes…Everything irrelevance is in our genes, otherwise we would not be going endlessly to the IMF…

ET Mensah…Rest in Peace…. At Teshie, he would be referring to any Ga who voted for JA Kufour as odonkpo (donkey) or ugly beast. Josiah Aryeh’s GaDangme jibes before he was trapped by a GaDangme chieftain, with Rawlings almost excusing him because, in his very informed opinion, there were others in the NDC who were worse than jailbirds.

JAK himself, just like Limann, hit the roof against ET Mensah, I suppose in political retaliation over the Odonkpo jibe in an indigenous Ga community. That was during the inauguration of a bridge between Prampram and Ningo, the twin fishing communities bordering Ada. Again, it is in our genes, as Ayikoi Otoo lamented in attempting to save the angry MP aspirant for Okai Koi North claiming to go independent.

Sparing Napo, tackling the issues

If Napo is considering committing suicide for offending Otumfuo, like Judas did, he should pardon himself, because even Mahama, like JA Kufour, reacting to a demonstration that the NPP professionals and GUTA Boys would be embarking on later, called for a Sledge Hammer that, indeed, came up from the nozzles of a state police to break heads and break one eye into the head.

So, NPP or NDC; propaganda or facts, what is more compelling is the issues, not the braggadocio and tumbling from the fingerling.

How today’s Nkrumaists vote

I may not have to blame Napo because if the researchers are on top of their jobs and research is going into communication, the Research Team would have known and communicated to Napo that Nkrumaists in Greater Accra and up inti the Northern Regions vote more for the NPP than NDC. Ask Nana Akomea, who must be familiar with the voting trend at Kaneshie-Awudome, Mpamplo neighbourhoods…the children of the Nkrumaists have since 1996 been voting for NPP.

Awudome Estates housed Kwane Nkrumah’s security personnel and other party apparatchiki. Ask IC Quaye and he would tell you that from Kokomlemle though New Town and Abavana Juction and Alajo to Kotobabi, the children and grandchildren of the Nkrumaists largely vote NPP. Check the Caantonments, North and South Labone…Third generation CPPists are voting NPP…

It is the same pattern in Adabraka, Ringway Estates and Nyaneba named after Kwame Nkrumah’s mother. But, it is also the same in South La Estates. Yet, I won’t see coins from the Research Fund coming my way. Should I blame it therefore on Dan Botwe or the Communication Minister? Or take the Research Team to School in grassroots communication which twaddle the loony Russian Communists have since been calling propaganda?

This is AD 2024 and a Breaking of the Eight. It is the year of rising and falling of kingdoms as the theologians insist.

That means developing fighting – not noise-making – strategies. Jericho fell long ago. What we have today is Hamas. The battle is not against Nkrumah; it is against JM and all that he and his men represent from 1992 till date.

By Abena Bawuaah