IS THE BITCH THAT BORE JUNE 4TH PREGNANT AGAIN? PART 1

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PART 1

By Gamel Nasser Adam

As Ghanaians go to the polls next month to elect a President and parliamentarians, the stakes have rarely been that high. The ruling New Patriotic Party has vowed to break the eight-year cycle of musical chairs played between the two dominant political parties by winning the elections in three successive rows. On the basis of the track record of the Nana Addo government, there are many who consider this optimism on the part of the NPP as too extravagant. It may also elicit a chuckle from observers of the Ghanaian political scene. It shouldn’t. The optimism with which the NPP is approaching the 2024 elections is bolstered by the highly controversial strategies the party successfully deployed in the two previous elections which secured the presidency for Nana Akufo Addo. The party seems determined to pull yet another fast one on the Ghanaian people and once again with the help of the Electoral Commission and the country’s apex court.  

Having risen to that high office on the back of a gullible electorate whom he cajoled with ludicrously extravagant promises prior to the 2020 elections, Nana Addo knew very well that these would eventually ricochet on him as a crisis of unfulfilled expectations which would jeopardize his chances of a second term. His best chance of clinging on to power was therefore to manipulate the system, capture vital state institutions and subdue the opposition by any means he deemed fit, including the use of lethal force. He accomplished the latter in a most grisly manner relying mostly on a loyalist armed wing of his party drawn from notorious vigilante groups whom he has legitimised by absorbing them into the security services.

The culture of political violence that the Nana Addo regime inflicted on the Ghanaian people may have been assuaged if there had been an economic turnaround to compensate for his brand of civilian dictatorship. Sadly, this has not been the case. His economic performance has been an unmitigated disaster. And the evidence is all around us. The national currency has virtually collapsed while galloping inflation has dramatically eroded people’s purchasing power wiping out an entire middle class in a most savage episode of economic genocide. Unprecedented levels of unemployment, especially among the youth and the pauperization of the masses, are all signs of an economy on life support in the intensive care unit.

As if this was not enough, the Nana Addo government demonstrated its inhuman lack of conscience by forcing those who have borne the brunt of the economic crises to pay the price of the government’s crass incompetence and gross mismanagement through suffocating taxes including the so-called E-Levy which was tantamount to the government acting like a pickpocket, literally dipping its hand in the pockets of its citizens and robbing them of their monies. It also encroached on the life savings of pensioners, callously oblivious of the spectre of hurrying many of these senior citizens prematurely to their graves. The Nana Addo government did all this in a failed attempt to avoid licking its own spittle, having earlier vowed never to seek an IMF financial bailout, citing what his then Minister of Finance called the Ghanaian national pride. Well, the IMF is back again in the saddle of Ghana’s economic and financial affairs with its middle finger directed at the Nana Addo government, and by extension at the Ghanaian people.

While all the crises deepen and the masses of the people don’t even have the belts to fasten their trousers to their waists, the regime has taken corruption, kleptocracy, graft and nepotism to new record levels. Nana Addo and his cabal have been doing this with brazen impunity, emboldened by a false sense of security following their successful capture of vital state institutions. With a premonition of what awaits them after leaving office, they plan to avoid accountability by packing the bench with judges sympathetic to the NPP, further stretching Ghana’s democratic experiment to the limits.   

The assault on democracy and the process of state capture, in line with the notorious Agyapadie agenda, started with the removal from office of the then Electoral Commissioner under dubious circumstances, and her replacement with a pliant poodle. Subsequent to this, publicly known NPP loyalists were appointed to the Commission in further preparation to tamper with the electoral process to ensure that the NPP’s stated goal of ‘breaking the eight’ will be achieved. Regional boundaries were realigned in an ethnically selective manner with the intention of weakening the electoral base of the main political opposition, the NDC. An unnecessary and wasteful compilation of a new voters’ register was carried out to pad the voting figures in a rolling rigging machine. Appointments to the country’s apex court have heightened fears that Nana Addo intends to use it to undermine democratic accountability and the sanctity of the electoral process. The issues surrounding the court’s recent spat with the Speaker of Parliament confirm the popular perception that it acts at the beck and call of the NPP and has little regard for the constitution.

The agenda for state capture also included the taking over of the commanding heights of the banking sector as well as the financial emasculation of real and imagined political and economic rivals especially in that sector. This began with the underhanded replacement of the then Governor of the Bank of Ghana and replacing him with one of their own. Other methods have included the intimidation of media houses critical of the NPP. While some were closed down, others were, and are still being starved of advertising revenue. The hostile harassment of opponents and even the murder and the threat of murder of journalists have all been the stock-in-trade of the NPP under Nana Addo. No wonder, therefore, Ghana’s democratic experiment has been pushed perilously close to the brink of collapse once again, and Nana Addo seems to be in a hurry to add Ghana to the long list of Africa’s political failures.

So, it came to pass, and after eight Ghanaian citizens were cold-bloodedly murdered at polling stations and collation centres across the country by party hoodlums dressed in official police and the military uniform, the Electoral Commissioner underhandedly declared Nana Addo the winner of the 2020 presidential election. The declaration was so hasty and clumsy that the Electoral Commission on several occasions backpedalled so awkwardly that it tripped over its own falsified figures. The arithmetic of the election tally was such a schoolboy howler that it could make a kindergarten child blush. The circumstances that allowed Nana Addo to claw his way to his second term in office are the closest we can get to the definition of a coup d’état. And it was bloody.

The fatal shootings during the Ayawaso Central by-election in 2017 were a dress rehearsal for the murders during the 2020 polls. The murder of a social activist in Ajura, who was critical of the failures and unfulfilled promises of the Nana Addo regime, and the subsequent killing and wounding of mourners by uniformed personnel are manifestations of the oppressor’s rule Ghana’s national anthem enjoins the people to resist. By applying this gestapo-style suppression of the opposition, the NPP cabal is deluding itself into thinking that it can permanently frighten the people into silence and submission. They are mistaking Ghanaians for cowards, and they do so at their own peril. It is true that Ghanaians have a generally peace-loving disposition, but this should not be mistaken as a trait embedded in their DNA. They abhor violence, and rightly so, and hope that the long-anticipated change can be delivered through peaceful means, but ‘when change is too long delayed or stubbornly resisted’, as Kwame Nkrumah notes in I Speak of Freedom, ‘violence will erupt here and there – not because men planned it and willed it – but because the accumulated grievances of the past erupt with volcanic fury.’

It would have been possible for us to rationalize the present climate of repression and distance ourselves psychologically from Nana Addo if he had ascended the presidency in 2017 through a military coup d’état. Just like how you would relate to a lunatic who runs away with your clothes while you are using the public bathhouse. But it is very painful to recollect that Nana Addo became president in 2017 through democratic elections at which he was presented as a human rights activist and an ardent defender of democracy and the rule of law. In fact, he once was the spokesperson for the now defunct Alliance for Change which organized nation-wide demonstrations in the very early years of Rawlings’ constitutional presidency, taking advantage of the freedoms and democratic latitude offered by a government whose political roots, ironically, had no pretensions to bourgeois democracy. Nana Addo eventually leveraged this early political activism to lay claim to the position of flagbearer of the NPP. Members of the Alliance for Change who still adhere to the principles of their early political activism must be licking their wounds now and asking, just like Julius Caesar asked when he saw his best friend among his assassins, ‘Et tu Brute?’ In fact, this betrayal by Nana Addo is many orders of magnitude more painful.

But those who knew Nana Addo very well had warned that it would be very dangerous to entrust him with power and the destiny of the country. These trepidations finally came to haunt the country after more than seven painful years. But one myth has now been conclusively and comprehensively shattered by Nana Addo and his cabal. It is that the preposterous pretence by the NPP tradition of being the doyens of democracy and the rule of law has finally collapsed before the people’s eyes and the fascist character behind the façade has been exposed. This cabal, comprising a coterie of Nana Addo’s extended family and close associates, has also supervised Ghana’s rapid transmogrification, first into a kleptocracy, and onward into a lootocracy (government by outright looting of the state coffers). Official corruption has run completely amok as organized greed has triumphed over democracy which Nana Addo has comprehensively disorganized.

The most notorious corruption scandals of Nana Addo’s first tenure as president were the PDS scandal, the BOST contaminated fuel scandal, the Ameri Deal scandal, the Agyapa scandal, and possibly many more which will come out in a future probe. The corruption counter which was reset for his second term in office almost immediately registered another big scandal associated with the procurement of Sputnik-V vaccines. Then there was the outrageous case of large stashes of foreign currencies in the private vaults of the then minister of environment, Cecilia Dapaah, running into millions of dollars. We also recall the corruption scandal surrounding the Ghana Revenue Authority and the Strategic Mobilization Ghana Limited, involving a whopping $100 million. In fact, you will never lose money betting on the next corruption scandal in Nana Addo’s government. So, don’t blink; you might miss the next one. This is because when a thief moves into the palace, he does not become king. The palace, (or call it Jubilee House), becomes a crime scene.  

As if the mounting collection of scandals wasn’t enough, the mint at Governor Adison’s highly indebted Bank of Ghana was made to work overtime unlawfully churning out paper money in reckless abandon allegedly, further exacerbating the inflationary pressures on the already battered economy. And when protesters demanded his resignation, he called them hooligans and uncivilized. Unbelievable! No conscientious public figure responsible for plunging his country into such dire straits would embark on such unrestrained effusions; not even after drinking Vodka from a fire hose. Clearly, the Governor is oblivious of the first law of holes, which is to stop digging. Unlike the late President Mills who turned the other cheek over and over again until he ran out of cheeks, a future Mahama-led government has vowed to apply the law of accountability to its fullest. And why Governor Adison could be in deep trouble is that his crime will not only be gross fiscal indiscipline. There is the equally outrageous and scandalous commitment by the Bank to erect a sprawling office complex costing in excess of US$200 million by some estimates.

In spite of the evidence of the NPP’s abysmal ineptitude and legendry corruption, the Nana Addo cabal still nurses the dream of clinging on to power by imposing Dr. Bawumia on the Ghanaian people, effectively ensuring a third term for Nana Addo. After more than seven years as deputy to Nana Addo, Dr. Bawumia should know by now that the cabal’s support for him is all about avoiding accountability in the future, and if he doesn’t want to suffer the consequences of the cabal’s self-destructive impulses, then he should prepare to distance himself from any of their actions that would undermine the integrity of the 2024 elections. He could pre-empt any plans by the cabal to repeat the electoral theft of 2020 by proactively congratulating the winner of the 2024 presidential election which almost certainly is not going to be him but will be John Mahama. The conditions that allowed for the subversion of the popular will of the people at the 2020 elections have changed. ‘Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me’, says the NDC, and it has vowed to take the game to the NPP this time. There are those who believe that the much-anticipated change cannot come about without resort to the most drastic measures. We hope and pray they are wrong. (End of part 1)

IS THE BITCH THAT BORE JUNE 4^TH PREGNANT AGAIN?

PART 2

By Gamel Nasser Adam

Collectively, the Ghanaian people heaved a sigh of relief that irrespective of the naked robbery perpetrated at the 2020 polls by the Nana Addo cabal in collaboration with the Electoral Commission, the victim of the robbery, the National Democratic Congress, still preferred to exercise patience and exhaust one of the last remaining constitutional and legal channels to stop the theft. The Party’s legal team and all honest observers were sure that the blatant electoral fraud would be exposed in court. There were many who believed that NDC lawyers had laid their hands on the dangling protuberances at the confluence of the two thighs of the beast. It was a male. The team hoped to prove this in court by stripping the beast naked. Unfortunately, the court incredulously refused to accept that those exhibits were indeed the beast’s testicles.

Those who gave hope a chance by supporting the resort to the courts to save our democracy lost out. They should have known that the assault on the country’s democracy by Nana Addo and his cabal would not have been so brazen if they truly believed that the NDC had any chance in the courts despite the strength of their case. Nevertheless, the NDC’s move was politically and strategically correct, though uncharacteristic of the offspring of revolution. If there were a reversal of fortunes, the NPP would have behaved differently. It would have unleashed mayhem on the country. In fact, while in opposition and preparing for the 2016 elections, an NPP activist threatened to turn Ghana into Afghanistan if Nana Addo was not declared winner in the impending election. The Party did not distance itself from those obstreperous effusions. The actions and inactions of Nana Addo over the years demonstrate clearly that he is ever ready to sacrifice the peace and tranquillity of Ghana at the altar of his perverse ambition for power and to insulate himself from future accountability. ‘An evil man will burn his own nation to the ground to rule over the ashes’, says Sun Tzu, the 5^th century BC Chinese philosopher.

As emotions were running high among the rank-and-file NDC members following the electoral robbery, many were anxious for action to be taken to stop this subversion of Ghana’s democracy. But great is the leader who maintains his calm and keeps his head above the sea of emotions swirling around him. Such a person was President John Mahama. The foundations of the nation’s peace were being shaken to breaking point, and the perpetrators seemed prepared to blow things up, caring little about the fact that they may not have survived the ensuing conflagration. This is where an analogy can be drawn between former President John Mahama and Nana Addo in relation to a narration in the scriptures about King Solomon and the two women who were laying claim to the same new-born baby boy. To determine who the genuine mother was, King Solomon ruled that the baby be cut in two so that each woman would receive half. The thieving woman approved of the ruling. If she would not have the baby, then the actual mother should also not have him. The latter however cried out loudly to King Solomon beseeching him not to split the baby and begged that the sword be put back in its sheath and the child entrusted to the care of the false mother. Cast in the mould of the thieving mother is Nana Addo who vowed that if he will not be president, then Ghana should die, and his battle cry was ‘all die be die’. Fortunately, John Mahama and the NDC pulled us back from the brink of an apocalyptic national strife.

In Orwellian doublespeak, Nana Addo’s NPP is shouting democracy on top of its voice, prodded on by a media whose failure to speak out against the 2020 electoral coup was not only dishonourable, but very dangerous. By so doing, these major Ghanaian media houses carved for themselves the dubious reputation of being servile appendages of the NPP. As a result, while the NPP and the Electoral Commission have continued to piss on the Ghanaian people, these presstitudes continue to tell us in Orwellian doublespeak that it is raining, that chaos is order, that liberty is oppression, that poverty is prosperity. By turning the truth upside down and reneging on their core responsibility of holding Nana Addo’s government to acceptable standards of scrutiny, these presstitudes as well as the other compromised estates of the realm are not only jeopardizing the stability of our democracy, but they are also prodding the NPP along a self-destructive path. They may be paying the Nana Addo cabal back for having offered them juicy appointments and lavish financial rewards, but such vile mutual backscratching actively undermines public confidence in democratic accountability. Equally important, a system that relies on falsehoods, fraud and deception is inherently unstable, and the violent suppression of its opponents will not guarantee its stability.

At the tip of Ghana’s morally corrupt pyramid are the Ghanaian clergy who, in sacrilegious irony, seem to suggest that resistance to oppressor’s rule and injustice is disobedience to God. It would be interesting to find out on whose side God is in this raging national crisis. Is God on the side of those who stole the election in 2020 and spilled blood in order to cling on to power and loot the national coffers and are poised to repeat it, or is He on the side of the oppressed who are simply demanding accountability and asking those in power to fix the country’s myriads of problems? The clergy should let us know. The silence of the Peace Council, the Catholic Bishops Conference, the Christian Council, the Office of the National Chief Imam, and all those who claim to be the moral voice of society is deafening. This is the time the masses of the Ghanaian people expect the clergy to speak out. By remaining silent, the clergy are being dishonest because when the truth is replaced by silence, then silence is a lie. And ‘Thou shall not lie’ was one of the Ten Commandments that Moses received directly from God Himself.

Until the advent of Nana Addo and the hawkish faction of the NPP, Ghana seemed to have been making progress in nurturing a political culture in which the citizens were gradually internalizing the tenets of multiparty democracy. The Ghanaian people were beginning to accept the rules and due processes of elections and the changing of governments through the ballot box arbitrated by an impartial electoral commission independent of government control. Such a political culture does not only ensure accountability, but it also insulates society from violence or lasting injustice. However, its strength is directly proportional to the strength of some key institutions of state among which are those that ensure a fair electoral process, the security agencies, the police, the judiciary, the media and others. Unfortunately, the aggressive and rabidly partisan infiltration of these institutions by Nana Addo and his cabal is undermining not only the integrity of the said institutions, but also their capacity to be impartial in executing their constitutionally assigned responsibilities. In fact, the conduct or misconduct of those institutions tasked with the responsibility of ensuring democratic accountability and stability is fast eroding their legitimacy and public confidence in them. This is a harbinger for a major national crisis. And when the current levels of kleptocracy and the abysmally poor management of the economy by the Nana Addo government are added to this toxic cocktail, the result could well be a political eruption.

In 2015 then flagbearer of the NPP, Nana Addo, warned of a Tunisian moment in Ghana in reference to the political powder keg ignited by the street vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, in an incident which cascaded into the Arab Spring. The crises which formed the background of that Tunisian moment are several orders of magnitude worse in Ghana today under President Nana Addo. Unemployment, runaway inflation, corruption, unbearable taxes, deteriorating living conditions, emasculation of political freedoms – all have reached epic proportions. Officialdom is showing criminal insensitivity to the plight of the suffering people by amassing personal wealth for themselves and their close families, engaging in open profligacy, official kleptomania and wanton dissipation of state resources with the president travelling internally in fifty-car convoys comprising the most luxurious four-wheel drives, and before the country filed for bankruptcy at the IMF, he was embarking on frivolous foreign trips flying in rented classy private five-star penthouse jets specially fitted for the comfort of the world’s flamboyant oligarchs. It beggars belief that the president does not see it as unconscionable that his vulgar extravagance is being financed by taxes extracted from the masses most of whom have been pauperized by his government’s abysmal economic performance.

Fortunately, history reassures us that the internal contradictions of such a morally bankrupt system are such that they always lead to its collapse. The trigger to such collapse may be what many see as a rigged process which ensured the selection of the NPP’s presidential candidate for the 2024 polls leading to the high-profile resignation from the Party of Mr. Allan Kyeremanteng. The timebomb has started ticking towards a possible implosion within the NPP. But knowing what we know about Nana Addo and his cabal and their dogged and immoral predilection for the monopolization of power, they are likely to do something very thoughtless. The rest of us should be worried. Ghana may not be interested in chaos but, with the NPP’s help, chaos seems to be interested in Ghana. We have to force a change of direction before it is too late; otherwise, we may end up where the NPP under Nana Addo is leading us. We have been there before. Yes, June 4^th was a bastard, but the libido of the bitch that bore him has reached a crescendo. Again! Some even say she is expectant and may go into labour any moment, especially if the cabal insists on what will amount to a third term for Nana Addo. It will be in the collective national interest to abort this dangerous foreboding. For this to happen, however, we need the democratic mobilization of the Ghanaian citizenry to ensure that December 7^th becomes the preferred and legitimate substitute for a June 4^th.