It seems rather apt that the soundtrack to former President John Mahama’s political career is the crash of breaking glass as he chucks rocks over the walls of his political opponents.
As a matter of fact, Mahama’s rise and fall hovers between cheap farce and theatre of the absurd. It has been one grandeur of political miscalculation upon the other and now he feels the only way for him to win back political power is to resort to cheap blackmail and economic espionage.
Yes, we all have painful memories of the former President. Don’t we? The havoc he has wrought on our dear nation, and the painful “dumsor” legacy.
In fact, Mr Mahama plunged this country into total darkness for four years. His “dumsor” economy lasted the entire time he was in the presidential office. Mahama had no grasp of how much work had gone into resolving the “dumsor” crisis by the Akufo-Addo government, but he is now seeing it as hindrance to his political ambition.
And now, Mr Mahama’s destructive side, that pleasure in political vandalism has taken better part of him, and he is threatening the state.
The point is, Mr Mahama’s dark genius was to shape the NDC in his own image, and he is now trying to vandalise the political architecture of Ghana’s energy system by using his willing enablers and accomplices both at GridCo and ECG to generate artificial shortfalls in energy supply for the purposes of political and electioneering gains.
In other words. He is playing with the delusions of his hangers-on at ECG and GridCo, and egging them on to sabotage the system with incessant power cuts so as to create a panic situation just as it did to his “dumsor” economy.
There is enough evidence to back this claim. The evidence is out there. I dare John Mahama to come out and deny that he is not using his puppets in the energy sector to create artificial “dumsor”
The worst aspect of this Mahama’s reckless sabotaging of the power sector is how his own NDC supporters are gloating and taunting the poor consumers of electricity, and insisting that “dumsor” is back.
In essence, Mr Mahama is using the same “dumsor” that he created to wreck more havoc for the poor consumers of elclectricity.
This has been a disgusting chapter in the politics of this man.
It is possible to imagine that Mr Mahama was smug enough to think that our political institutions were sufficiently robust to withstand his own cynical abuse of them. But this is what is so strange about Mr Mahama’s place in history. It is hard to think of a figure at once so fatuous and so consequential, so flippant and yet so profoundly devilish. His previous stint of political reign was short but its malign hangover will last long.
Perhaps, the first bit of Shakespearean line of Mark Antony’s elegy for Julius Caesar should suffice here: “The evil that men do lives after them”. If the good that Mr Mahama did in his public life is to be interred with his bones, the coffin will be light enough. But the evil will weigh heavily on the coming decades.
Additionally, the Shakespearian character Mahama most resembles is Falstaff. An overweight character who tries to present himself as a ladies’ man. The wives are immune to his perjured romance, and instead of getting his end away, he is thrown out in a basket of soiled laundry.
And the comparison of Mahama to Falstaff, is simply to the effect that he has failed to make the move from comedy to history.
In fact, there are quite a few of Mahama’s fantasies whose very grandiosity made his political journey infantile. His roguishness and triviality has diminished him in the eyes of the population.
And of course, his relentless mendacity and blatantly self-seeking has ruined his reputation for democratic decency.
The disgrace is that, for Mr Mahama, all of this is so trifling. He is a politician so incompetent that he could not keep himself in office. But then his lust for power is real and deep, at least as demanding as his other, more bodily appetites.
In all honesty, Mr Mahama has always had a sense of living on borrowed time, living minute by minute, in the hope he will not get caught out now and can bamboozle his way into the future. Much like Adolf Hitler.
There’s no doubt that Mr Mahama is a political vandal and the waste of space but we must all spare a thought for the deluded NDC party which elected him. They’re complicit in this act of vandalism and they must pay the political price in the forthcoming general elections.
By Ernest Kofi Owusu-Bempah Bonsu Deputy Director of Communications, NPP