Mere Denial Is No Forensically Sustainable Refutation, Cousin Bawa Mogtari

She has been on the public dole or payroll since her twice-defeated, one-term former President and Cousin John “European Airbus Payola” Dramani Mahama was seismically ousted from Jubilee House on January 7, 2017, and has continued to do so, even while pumping out triplets at the expense of Ghanaian taxpayers, with the boondoggle title of “Special Aide” to Yagbonwura Kwame Gonja. So, it is not as if Mrs. Joyce Bawa Mogtari, who was appointed Deputy Road Transport Minister in Cousin Mahama’s ragtag government of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), has really been living an economically independent existence and can, therefore, be confidently and objectively described as a clean political operative who has been living well above aboard or the fray, as it is routinely said hereabouts in the Big Apple of the New York Metropolis.

Plus, by her own public and personal testimony, Joyce Bawa Mogtari drove around the country for more than two years without a legitimately issued valid driver’s license, even as the official Second-in-Command of the Ministry in charge of the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority (DVLA). So, it is not as if Joyce Bawa Mogtari really has any credibility and/or moral integrity to protect from her perceived main detractors and political opponents, to wit, the key operatives of the New Patriotic Party (NPP). She is a hardened scofflaw! You see, corruption runs through the Mahama Clan, of which Cousin Mogtari is both a niece and a granddaughter, like DNA, beginning with the late Mr. Emmanuel Adama Mahama, father of Cousin Kwame Gonja Mahama, who was the first Northern Regional Minister to have been named to the post by Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah, subsequently renamed the first Executive President of First-Republican Ghana.

Now, we make the preceding observation so as to highlight the fact that it was the relatively far more honest and conscientious father of the now-Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia, to wit, Alhaji Mumuni Bawumia, who boldly exposed the venal shenanigans of Mr. Adama Mahama, that led to the latter’s temporary removal from the Nkrumah-led Convention People’s Party (CPP) government. For the latter reason, the members of the Bole-Bamboi-based Mahama Clan, in the Akufo-Addo-created Savannah Region, have never forgiven the members of the Walewale-based Bawumia Clan, also from the Akufo-Addo-created North-East Region.

We can all rest assured that the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC) Foundation Foreign Scholarship List widely publicized by the local and the mainstream Ghanaian media (See “I’ve Never Received a GNPC Scholarship – Joyce Bawa Mogtari” Modernghana.com 4/15/24), on which the name of the so-called Mahama Special Aide appears is authentic and was neither concocted nor fabricated by either the 2024 Presidential Candidate of the ruling New Patriotic Party or any known or nationally unknown members of the 2024 Mahamudu Bawumia Presidential Campaign. And by the way, not surprisingly, on the very same list, the names of Messrs. Samuel Okudzeto-Ablakwa and Felix Kwakye-Ofosu or Ofosu-Kwakye also appear. This is absolutely no happenstance.

You see, it has often been said that: “There is no smoke without the presence of fire.” Now, what the foregoing quote means is that these three key operatives of the Mahama and the Johnson “The Mosquito” Asiedu-Nketia Gang could very well have fronted for the real beneficiaries of the aforementioned GNPC Foundation Foreign Scholarship Awards. In the case of Mr. Okudzeto-Ablakwa, very likely, the former Atta-Mills-appointed Deputy Information Minister and the former Mahama-appointed Deputy Education Minister for Tertiary Education, may very well have fronted for his younger sister who, as we all vividly recall, arrived right here in the United States of America and quickly got herself criminally involved in what was at the time described by both the US and the Ghanaian media as “Mail Fraud.”

This writer personally wrote and published at least a couple, if not a half-dozen, columns earnestly pleading for judicial leniency or clemency for Mr. Ablakwa’s then 18- or 19-year-old kid sister. Which was why I could not stop myself from literally rolling on the rug of my living room floor with guffaws and literally hold my sides in order to avoid exploding with uncontrollable laughter. Back then, many of us critical and sedulous observers of Ghana’s Fourth Republican Political Culture publicly wondered just how a wet-eared Mr. Ablakwa, recently elected as the North-Tongu’s National Democratic Congress-sponsored Member of Ghana’s Parliament, from Rural Volta Region, could have so quickly amassed the quite considerable fiscal resources that it took to sponsor his kid sister in an expensive private college or university in the American Mid-West.

As of this writing, Truly Yours had come across another news story in which Mr. Ablakwa was headlined calling for an alleged accuser to immediately retract and unreservedly apologize for a purportedly defamatory statement made against this most vitriolic and stentorian critic of the Akufo-Addo Administration. I did not have time to attend or pore over the details of the aforesaid news item, as Nigerians are wont to call it, because I had to quickly gather my thoughts together, take notes on the fly, as it were, and promptly fire off the present column to the press. I intend to take in the details of the Ablakwa news story and let my Dear Readers in on what I think about the same in due course. Or maybe not. Just stay tuned, Dear Readers.

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
April 15, 2024
E-mail: [email protected]