[ 2017-01-17 ]

Former President John Mahama

Mahama’s bungalow request premeditated – Martin Amidu
Former Attorney General, Martin Amidu, has said
that former President John Mahama’s request to
keep his official bungalow as part of his
retirement package was a ploy he nursed over the
years.

John Mahama last week backtracked following a
public outcry on a request he made to the Nana
Akufo-Addo government to allow him keep the
bungalow No. 3, Prestige Link at Cantonments in
Accra, which he occupied while he was Vice
President, before becoming President.

Martin Amidu, who is also an anti-corruption
campaigner in his recent statement, said
Mahama’s request was full of malice.

“The John Mahama retirement residence and office
saga nearly cost you well-meaning supporters both
in your political party and amongst ordinary
citizens of good will. The ordinary Ghanaian was
quick to see that Mahama had with preconceived
malice planned for years to take the Vice
President’s residence for himself as his
life-long retirement home right after Professor
Mills’ demise.”

“Even the ordinary Ghanaian sitting in the
Madina trotro bus realized that Mahama’s scheme
of remaining in the Vice President’s official
residence instead of moving to the Presidential
residence at the Flag Staff House was part of his
pre-meditated and internalized looting behavior of
state assets,” he stated.

The anti-corruption campaigner also argued that
Mahama’s U-turn on the matter was only a
“face-saving” move.

“Mr. President, you need no reminder that an
experience and eminent lawyer and statesman of
your caliber ought to be wary when dealing with
public purse looters of any hue. I thank God that
like the monkey which says the mango at the tip of
the branch of the tree top which he cannot reach
and pluck smells badly, and therefore he does not
want it, so too John Mahama with his tail between
his legs seeing that Ghanaians were overwhelmingly
against his looting of the official residence and
office as his retirement award for life, has
ingeniously made a face-saving by writing to
withdraw his earlier letter of request with a
curious copy to the King of Asante.”

Below is Martin Amidu’s full piece:

Your Excellency, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo,
President of the Republic of Ghana! We travelled
the same path as fellow travelers and citizens
seeking free and fair elections at the 7th
December 2016 Presidential and General elections
when you were the Presidential candidate of the
New Patriotic Party (NPP). That auditions journey,
by the will of the electorate, resulted in the
potentiality for positive and lasting democratic
change for our great country Ghana when you
overwhelmingly won the elections for President.
Ghanaians have since been waiting with bated
breath for their votes to be reciprocated with the
transformation of the potential into real,
concrete, and above all positive changes as you
assured the nation.

At mid night on 6th January 2017 Parliament was
convoked with a majority of members belonging to
the NPP which sponsored your candidature for
President.

The next day, 7th January 2017 upon your taking
the solemn oath of office and assuming office as a
popularly elected President and Commander-in-Chief
of our dear Republic in recent memory we, your
fellow travellers parted company with you as
citizen travellers to remain citizens only while
you took your additional and rightful place as
President and Commander-in-Chief of the Republic
of Ghana for the next four years. In these coming
four years, your fate for the success or failure
of the management of the enterprise called
Corporate Ghana is solely in your own and
exclusive hands.

Mr. President there is no gain saying that the
experiences of the majority of Ghanaians in the
immediate past few years have generated tremendous
support and enthusiasm for your professed cause of
action to save our dear country within the next
four years. In whatever you do for the next four
years, remember that unlike your predecessor whose
mandate was based on a casting vote of the Supreme
Court, you received the overwhelming vote of the
entire nation in spite of deliberate attempts by
the incumbent to rig the elections.

Electoral Commission and cohort member, it does
not now matter to us whether the margin between
the winner and incumbent stood at 1.5 million when
you succumbed and declared the results or at your
revised figure of 984,570 votes as you caused to
be published on Starrfm on 12th January 2017
Gambian style – we the citizens thwarted the
rigging machine, period!

Your Excellency Mr. President, in this new
presidential journey upon which you have embarked,
remember at all times during your tenure that your
massive victory and thrashing of the incumbent,
and the majority parliamentary seats your
political party gained was not the exclusive work
of members of the political party that sponsored
your candidature. Indeed, it was the collective
work of millions of ordinary Ghanaians including
some frustrated supporters of the National
Democratic Congress (NDC), our brothers and
sisters in uniform, retired persons on the reserve
list, and retired persons generally who had
committed their lives to fighting the machinery
which the incumbent had put in place to facilitate
rigging the elections against the winning
candidate.

Your Excellency, these ordinary Ghanaians are not
looking for appointments or positions in your
Government neither do they care about the usual
diplomatic political correctness of the
international community in pretending that these
citizens did not actively thwart the incumbent’s
rigging machine that forced the acceptance of
defeat and the symbolic arrangements for conceding
defeat before the results were finally announced
by the Electoral Commission. All that these
ordinary and committed citizens care about is that
you never repeat the mistakes of your immediate
predecessor’s government which simply took
Ghanaians for granted as undiscerning and looted
them to pulp.

ECOWAS and the other international political
establishments did not commission Ghanaians to
defend their own country and its democratic
credentials. This is Ghana, and John Dramani
Mahama and his cohorts could not have refused to
concede defeat when the victory was so
overwhelming let alone to have done what Yahaya
Jammeh did in The Gambia. Thank God! The facts and
social and political interactions from 7th
December 2016 to the formal declaration of the
results will forever be preserved in cyberspace to
support the fact that there were active malicious
attempts to rig the elections in Ghana by the
incumbent and his cohorts.

And no amount of reframing of the facts by any
external bodies to give the appearance that John
Mahama voluntarily conceded defeat to the winner
can ever change what really happened. The prime
credit for successfully managing last year’s
elections goes first and foremost to the Supreme
Court of Ghana for narrowing the windows for
rigging and secondly to the vigilance of ordinary
Ghanaians against that type of looting which must
be acknowledged by the international community and
not reframed.

Your Excellency, I have read several written
statements by fellow citizens showing the usual
euphoria of victory in trying to deify you even
before you can execute any of your promised
developmental plans, adherence to the rule of law
and good governance systems. Such unintended
sycophancy is the greatest danger facing African
leaders including Ghana with numerous examples of
the halleluiah, halleluiah today and cries of
crucify him, crucify him tomorrow.

Remember always that governance as a human
enterprise is susceptible to unforeseen natural
contingencies that affect every human endeavor
whatever one’s good intentions and wishes. It
works like applying quantum mechanics theory in
social and political interactions.

Mr. President, you have been in office for a week
already and in the process of forming your
Government. Ghanaians exhibit a great deal of good
will for you to succeed as President. But make
haste slowly and be fairly sure of each step you
take. The John Mahama retirement residence and
office saga nearly cost you well-meaning
supporters both in your political party and
amongst ordinary citizens of good will. The
ordinary Ghanaian was quick to see that Mahama had
with preconceived malice planned for years to take
the Vice President’s residence for himself as
his life-long retirement home right after
Professor Mills’ demise. Even the ordinary
Ghanaian sitting in the Madina tro tro bus
realized that Mahama’s scheme of remaining in
the Vice President’s official residence instead
of moving to the Presidential residence at the
Flagg Staff House was part of his pre-meditated
and internalized looting behavior of state
assets.

Mr. President, you need no reminder that an
experience and eminent lawyer and statesman of
your caliber ought to be wary when dealing with
public purse looters of any hue. I thank God that
like the monkey which says the mango at the tip of
the branch of the tree top which he cannot reach
and pluck smells badly, and therefore he does not
want it, so too John Mahama with his tail between
his legs seeing that Ghanaians were overwhelmingly
against his looting of the official residence and
office as his retirement award for life, has
ingeniously made a face-saving by writing to
withdraw his earlier letter of request with a
curious copy to the King of Asante. Manasseh Azure
Awuni’s beautiful article – “Manasseh’s
Folder: of a greedy nation and a homeless
president” – should be a must read for
citizens seeking a fair analysis of the Bungalow
No. 3 Prestige Link (residence) and Bungalow No. 6
on 3rd Avenue, Ridge (office) premeditated looting
saga (see myjoyonline.com).

Mr. President, your anti-corruption promise and
agenda in my view was your winning manifesto item
at the elections whose actualization we are
expecting you to implement without fear or favour,
affection or ill will, no matter whose ass is
gored. I agree entirely with former President
Rawlings that it is the high anti-corruption moral
ground you occupied over the NDC which made your
victory a foregone conclusion. Many Ghanaians,
like me, are not followers of your political party
but I dare say that as long as you continue
occupying that high moral ground and fight
corruption in deeds you will succeed and your
first four-year tenure will usher in the golden
age of Ghana again. I also have no reason to doubt
that as long as you always put Ghana First in your
administration the present goodwill you enjoy will
endure throughout your tenure.

My humble observation from some of your recent
pronouncements and acts as President, however, is
that you appear to trust so many people without
any reservations. In my experience, that has been
the undoing of many an honest statesman. Duncan,
King of Scotland, in Macbeth after describing
Macbeth as:

“O valiant cousin! Worthy gentleman!” and
declaring – “Great happiness!” to the news
of victory also said of his hitherto trusted Thane
of Cawdor who had turned traitor and rebel that:
“There’s no art To find the mind’s
construction in the face. He was a gentleman on
whom I built An absolute trust.” But as fate had
it Duncan immediately placed his unreserved trust
in the valiant cousin and worthy gentleman,
Macbeth, and that became his undoing. A word to
the wise is enough or as some of us from northern
Ghana playfully like putting it, “a word to the
wise is in the north”.

Mr. President, your fate for the next four years
is entirely in your own hands. God helps those who
help themselves. May God, Allah, help you – Good
luck! Put Ghana First!
Martin A. B. K. Amidu
Accra, 15th January 2017

Source - citifmonline.com

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