And so President "Ali Baba" Dramani Mahama has, once again, been caught with his proverbial pants down, just when we thought he should be telling the Ghanaian taxpayer the exact date for the return of the 1.5 tons of gold bars that his government surreptitiously airlifted to the Iranian government of President Ahmedinejad. In the latest scandal, we have the government of the so-called National Democratic Congress (NDC) sponsoring some two-hundred (200) specially selected clergymen and women, too, I suppose, for a pilgrimage to the State of Isreal (See "Catholic Church Rejects Prez Mahama's Gesture" MyJoyOnline.com 3/14/13). What annoys me here, though, is the fact that so cynical have the key operatives of the Mahama-Amissah-Arthur government become as to cavalierly suppose that they could even bribe their way to Heaven, in much the same way that they managed to bribe the Electoral Commission (EC) into ceding them a patently undeserved Election 2012 victory. Anyway, for those of our readers who might have missed the same, Dr. Afari-Gyan recently told the media in the Volta regional capital of Ho, at a conference that was billed as a post-electoral review aimed at "Enhancing the Credibility of Election 2012," that an undisclosed huge amount of liquid cash that had been made available to the EC for the training of election-related contractors, had largely been embezzled by some unspecified number of salaried staff of the Electoral Commission under the watch of Dr. Afari-Gyan, the man who has been conducting elections at various levels in the country for some two decades now. What is rather amusing is the fact that the man who nefariously supervised this caper wants the global community to congratulate him for having, supposedly, run the finest biometric verification exercise in the universe. Even more laughable, Dr. Afari-Gyan intends to shortly have all the alleged EC staff members involved in the Election 2012 scam prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, while the comfortably salaried supervisor of such epic scam, Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan, himself, is allowed not only to keep the job for which he has exhibited gross and unprecedented incompetence, but actually given a deafening pat on the back, presumably in the form of a pay hike, that is, assuming he has not already been afforded a humongous hike by President Ali Baba. Now, the Mahama-Amissah-Arthur political horse traders are telling Ghanaians that, after all, the widely alleged $ 2 million worth pilgrimage sponsorship to Jerusalem for some two-hundred (200) Christian clerics, is not coming from the same public till that the erstwhile Mills-Mahama government enabled Mr. Alfred Agbesi Woyome to take GHC 51-million-plus, but rather from the deep wallets of some yet-to-be-disclosed "private sponsors." Just why these private sponsors would contract the Mahama government to undertake the selection and flying of the concerned pastors to Jerusalem and other parts of the Holy Land, has also yet to be publicly clarified. What I am personally worried about, however, regards the amount of public money, or dole, that the NDC government must have already illegally used in funding Muslim pilgrims to Mecca, Saudi Arabia, over the past four years, while the Ghanaian taxpayer was busy eking out a barely livable existence. Needless to say, Ghanaians have on innumerable occasions witnessed the NDC government playing politics with the annual Hajj to Mecca, almost as if the country had officially been declared an Islamic republic. And for those of our readers who are too young to remember this, it may be of great interest to know that Gen. I. K. Acheampong once sponsored a National Week of Prayer and Repentance, in a bid to ameliorate what was then widely perceived to be a rank national culture of decadence at the Independence Square and shortly got summarily executed by firing squad by the Rawlings-led Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC). At least the latter event was cited as one of the capital crimes committed by the Acheampong-led Supreme Military Council (SMC I). Indeed, it ought to worry well-meaning Ghanaians that during the three-and-half years that the now-President Mahama served as Vice-President to the late President John Evans Atta-Mills, not once were we given to believe that any well-heeled group of private citizens had approached the government of the National Democratic Congress for help in "culling out" and sponsoring a bevy of Christian ministers for a pilgrimage to the proverbial Holy Land. I sense something "ratty" and circumstantially Election 2012 payola "scammy" here. Or maybe this is Mr. Mahama's peculiar way of "decently" thanking the Ghana Peace Council for making such a delectable mess of the response of the Council to the epic fraud that was the Gyan-Mahama electoral collaborative? _____________________________________________________ *Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D. Department of English Nassau Community College of SUNY Garden City, New York March 19, 2013