Nkrumah meets Gorbachev on Mahama’s farm

In contesting the presidency, he had returned from exile from politics which hit him at the age of nine following a military coup and the detention of his father- a top party leader during Kwame Nkrumah’s regime – while he attended Achimota’s boarding Primary School. A school employee, known as ‘’Auntie’’, took him for holiday […]

In contesting the presidency, he had returned from exile from politics which hit him at the age of nine following a military coup and the detention of his father- a top party leader during Kwame Nkrumah’s regime – while he attended Achimota’s boarding Primary School. A school employee, known as ‘’Auntie’’, took him for holiday to former home now occupied by a snarling military tank and harsh soldiers. Jerry Rawlings’ coup against President Hilla Liman continued his exile from politics compelling him and two older brothers to human-traffic their father across the border into Cote d’Ivoir. A radio announcement had again called on Mr Mahama to report for detention ‘’for his own security’’. Joining his nomadic father later in Lagos, he would witness a young lad kicked, stoned, drenched with kerosene and set on fire by a mob. From the lad’s speech he recognized him to be a Ghanaian.

Dramani’s exile was terminated, at least intellectually, during student days in the Soviet Union; just as Mikhail Gorbachev introduced perestroika and demokratizatsiya. The one opened up state-owned enterprises to self-financing; forcing them to make profits instead of relying on government subsidies. The state enterprises were freed from the iron grip of the central planning body – the ‘’Gosplan’’- which allocated raw materials to factories. The other reform introduced ‘’multi-candidate elections’’ into a politics long monopolised by the single Communist Party. As a starry-eyed supporter of socialism – from pages of books during his student days in Ghana – he now saw that the system of governance in the Soviet Union was also a work- in- progress; and Gorbachev was in search of the ‘’perfect union’’.
That sobering reality pill would translate into the dictum that ‘Ghana Must Grow’; based on its own potential and needs. In that view he joins Mwai Kibaki’s Kenya crafting a more open constitutional basket in 2010;  Kagame’s Rwanda and Museveni’s Uganda giving national politics more women’s wits, grits. Head ties and wrappers; Senegal’s multitude of political parties holding hands to cast ballots in unison to throw Abdullaye Wade out of unconstitutional elongation of incumbency; and Mugabe using politics of  people’s stomachs to win a massive mandate in 2013.He also joins Nigeria as laboratory where the alchemy of political growth has rolled on from tending wounds of a civil war after 1970 to  a ‘’transformation agenda’’ in 2014, having hop-stepped-and- jumped over military fangs guarding military electoral dramas of  ‘’a Little to the Left and a Little to the Right’ ideologies.
Dramani had been told many stories by Saifu, a guard at their home. His favourite one was ‘’Taka, Tika and Gangale’’. These were three birds who earned their living from being rewarded for melodious sounds their wings made and market women loved to hear rendered in a chorus.  Their income collapsed when they tried solo performances; forcing them into resolving ‘’never again to allow their pride to stand in the way of their progress’’. This tale came back to him as he watched a driver of a bus he travelled in from Accra to Lagos hop from a ritual of paying a bribe to a gendarme every five kilometres across Togo on the road to Lagos. He became one African Head of State who may be responsive to Maria Ramos’ plea for VISAS –like customs police on boarders – to be abolished among African countries. The Barclays Bank executive spoke at the Mo Ibrahim Foundation Forum held on 9th December, 2013 in Addis Ababa. She wants Africa’s managerial talent to flow across Africa and enhance economic productivity.

One of Drama’s senior brothers, Alfred, was the lead singer in a school band known as “Frozen Fire’’. As he grew older he would borrow that name to lament that the “flame that had been sparked by Ghana’s independence and subsequently blazed a trail of freedom throughout the continent had indeed been frozen’’.  Bloody explosions in Algeria, Mali, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Central African Republic, South Sudan and Somalia, suggests that somebody is lighting up fires frozen in Africa’s 40 million unemployed youths. The Ghana that Dramani now rules must push the African Union not to allow unemployment to ‘’stand in the way of their progress’’. The fire in youths must be turned from lynching persons in streets of Lagos, Juba or Bangui into fuel for building freedom and development.
Ghana’s national team, the ‘’Black Stars’’, have played two vital penalty shootouts in South Africa: at the 2010 World Cup and the 2014 CHAN.  It were well if President Mahama urged parliament to include in the national budget fees for a bird that speaks Akan language to travel with the team and chant out : ‘’Anaa?”, as a potential miss-kicker runs to choose a corner in a defending goalkeeper’s net. ‘’Anaa’’ is a doubt that may ‘’prompt us to formulate new opinions, make alternative decisions’’.