The decision by the National Democratic Congress’ Abongo Boys not to have their presidential candidate and sitting President of the Republic of Ghana, Mr. John Dramani Mahama, participate in this year’s Institute of Economic Affairs-sponsored presidential debates will not alter the grim reality of the dismal performance record of the grossly incompetent Mahama/Amissah-Arthur government one way or another. Besides, it ought to be all-too-obvious to most eligible Ghanaian voters by now that the scandal-wracked NDC is merely using its decision to boycott this year’s IEA-sponsored presidential debates to save face.

It goes without saying that the NDC headquarters’ apparatchiks know perfectly well that ethical issues like the Ford Expedition payola scam were apt to preface the bulk of the series of questions with which debate moderators and their associates would have peppered Mr. Mahama. It also comes as absolutely no surprise at all because nearly every season that a presidential candidate of the NDC participated in the IEA-sponsored debates, that candidate had to be literally dragged and jostled or collared to the podium.

The NDC apparatchiks were also cynically using the forum to sponsor political surrogates like Mr. Hassan Ayariga, the former People’s National Convention’s presidential candidate, to make utter nonsense of this otherwise very adult momentous affair by systematically annoying the most formidable opponent of their candidate, such as the entire nation embarrassingly witnessed in the lead-up to the 2012 presidential election. It is also quite obvious that the Mahama Posse decided to back out of the 2016 presidential debates because IEA’s Executive Director Jean Mensa put her feet firmly on the ground in deciding that a toe-to-toe contest between the presidential candidates of the country’s two major political parties, namely, the National Democratic Congress and the New Patriotic Party (NPP), will not involve any of the deliberately planted distractive surrogates of the NDC Abongo Boys.

To fully appreciate the psychological mindset, or temperament, of the NDC, the history of the leadership of the party, that of “revolutionary radicalism,” ought to be borne in mind. Twenty years after “democratically” dominating the political landscape of Fourth-Republican Ghana, the NDC leadership has yet to fully adjust itself in order to become comfortable with the civilized culture of democratic discourse and governance. Which is why President Mahama and his diehard surrogates on the board of the so-called Independent Electoral Commission (EC), spearheaded by Mrs. Charlotte Kesson-Smith Osei, continue to play peek-a-boo with the Supreme Court’s order to promptly expunge the names of all registered voters who exercised their franchise four years ago by the now-delegitimized use of their National Health Insurance (NHIS) cards.

The Mahama Posse appears poised to rigging their way, once more, through the 2016 general election. But whether Ghanaian citizens and voters would have the stomach to accommodate the criminal shenanigans of the thoroughgoing corrupt Mahama/Amissah-Arthur regime, is anybody’s good guess. It is also interesting to hear the NDC Abongo Boys offer the patently hollow and logically untenable pretext of the IEA-sponsored presidential debates’ not being enshrined in the 1992 Constitution as a reason for declining to participate in the 2016 presidential debates. Maybe somebody smarter ought to ask these NDC Abongo Boys precisely when they came to a realization of this perennial fact.

Then also, the NDC Abongo Boys risibly claim that Mrs. Jean Mensa decided to schedule a two-party debate between Nana Akufo-Addo, the New Patriotic Party’s presidential candidate, and President Mahama without officially notifying them in writing. It is quite scandalously obvious that the Mosquito Mafia Boys have the long-term memory capacity of the Anopheles Mosquito; for scarcely a month ago, Monsieur Koku Anyidoho and his party headquarters associates virulently accused Foreign Minister Hanna Tetteh and President Mahama of having covertly negotiated the details of the IEA-sponsored 2016 presidential debates without their consent. I bet you thought these scoundrels were psychologically and emotionally sound.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

Garden City, New York

June 22, 2016

E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net