I had the chance to listen to the morally and intellectually spellbinding remarks of retired Chief Justice Sophia Akuffo from the picket line in front of the Ministry of Finance’s headquarters edifice in Accra and was both heart-broken and utterly disappointed that the President, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, has so scandalously permitted the fiscal well-being of the country to so precipitously degenerate into the veritable crisis of acute indebtedness and downright insolvency of the infernal kind of the Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings-led “Revolutionary Era” of the 1980s through most of the 1990s into the year 2000. Now, the question that all Ghanaians seem to be asking is this: “Did we go or did we come?” (See “People Like Gabby Otchere-Darko.
Are Not Important, He’s a Disturbance – Sophia Akuffo” Ghanaweb.com 2/14/23).
It well appears that his all-too-well-known epic flaw of complacency may very well have caused the former Attorney-General and Minister of Justice in the government of President John “Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor to allow the near-complete nullification of the great and hitherto unprecedented gains of Nana Akufo-Addo’s unarguable Golden Age of his first term in office.
About the only “skinny” consolation here presently is the fact that there is still “Sor-Sor,” as opposed to the four-and-half protracted years of “Dumsor” that were insensitively visited on the heads of the Ghanaian people by a pathologically kleptocratic and grossly incompetent President Chief Justice Emerita Akuffo May Be Underestimating the Destructive Power and Influence of Otchere-Darko John “European Airbus Payola” Dramani Mahama, which effectively resulted in the complete collapse of more than 50-percent of all Ghanaian businesses, both privately and state-owned enterprises.
From the videoclip that featured Retired Chief Justice Sophia Akuffo, a relative of Nana AkufoAddo on the latter’s agnatic side of the family, the Agyekum-Kufuor-created and bequeathed keystone health-related social-intervention program may have effectively collapsed, with senior citizens having been forced to, once again, pay for the full-cost of their medications and other crucial and vital healthcare needs, because the hitherto low-premium National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) appears to have decidedly and effectively lost its credibility and utility through acute insolvency or lack of adequate government funding. Which, in effect, means that Nana
Akufo-Addo is rapidly on his way to inescapably transforming – actually transmogrifying – into a veritable clone of his immediate predecessor, to wit, former President John “SADA-AkonfemKanazoe Ouagadougou” Dramani Mahama.
If the foregoing critical observation has any iota of validity, then, as a nation and a people,
Ghanaians have a very long way to go, in the memorable words of the popular poet, lawyer and banker, Mr. Kobena Eyi-Acquah. Once again, listening to the Cri-de-Coeur of former Chief Justice Sophia Akuffo, one got the eerie sense that the so-called Domestic Debt Exchange.
Program (DDEP) was inescapably and ingloriously just another euphemistic bromide for the IMFWorld Bank-minted and the late Prof. Kwesi Botchway- and Chairman Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings-midwifed Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) that effectively and genocidally destroyed the industrial health and development of our beloved nation over the deleterious course of some two decades. And on the latter count, of course, the direct and unmistakable reference here is to the complete politically and morally unconscionable quartering up of the Kwame Nkrumah-created seminal industrial revolution that was the group of some 120 factories and manufacturing plants that constituted the functional and operational core of the once globally
renowned and locally celebrated Ghana Industrial Holdings Corporation (GIHOC).
Under the otherwise opportune and auspicious watch of President Akufo-Addo, there has been a spirited attempt to revive Nkrumah’s nonesuch visionary industrial revolution by the epochal relabeling or re-designation of GIHOC as the “One District, One Factory” National Industrial.
Development Initiative (NIDI). Now, depending on whose narrative or version of the story one reads or listens to, at best, the “One District, One Factory” national development initiative has either become a veritable pipedream, that is, a mirage, or an otherwise well-intentioned national industrial development project that never really or quite effectively got off the ground or off to a good start.
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