KSM was right, Sammy; the optics aren’t good
Sammy Gyamfi may have been let off the hook; President Mahama has acquitted and discharged him in the “Dollar-gate” scandal.
But as Kweku Sintim Misa pointed out on his KSM Show, the problem “is the optics” and if anybody knows politics in Ghana – at least, going by the last elections that returned NDC to power – optics are everything.
Optics is what is left lingering in the minds of voters by what they see and hear.
They seldom forget, a là Akufo-Addo ordering chiefs to rise from their thrones to greet him.
From the day the ordinary NDC foot-soldier and the millions of ‘mobrowa’ supporters of the party saw Sammy Gyamfi counting out crisp 100-dollar notes and handing out US$800 (total) to Patricia Asiedua Asiama, popularly referred to as Nana Agradaa, their eyes have been opened to the reality of the world of haves and have-nots.
In the same way as hunger pangs worsen at the sight of someone enjoying a feast, so does poverty get more pronounced in the pockets of the lean and hungry at the sight of so much money: suddenly wealth is so near yet so far away.
True, the poor in the party had never deceived themselves that they are on a level with the likes of Sammy Gyamfi; education and the social ladder have distanced them from him.
They have never deceived themselves into hoping that all the fingers would ever be equal.
To rub these painful truisms in their faces, like Cecilia Dapaah’s millions hoarded in her house, however, is insult to injury.
Suddenly, the poor are made aware that “there is money in politics to share” but it will never get down to their level. “Two legs good…”
They ask: only five months into the party’s (Mahama’s) return to power, where did one man get so much money from?
He is a lawyer, yes, but how often has he gone to court in the last four years?
He has held party executive positions and held lucrative board memberships, but are they paid in dollars?
If Agradaa who, late in 2024, openly predicted Mahama and National Democratic Congress (NDC’s) loss in the election, is getting $800, how much will go, or has gone, to prophet Owusu Bempah and all those pastors who prophetically placed their hands on Mahama’s head in Kumasi?
The above is how the average hungry party supporter adds one to one to make two.
When these thoughts get conflated by uncontrollable prices of goods and impossible fares, any ruling party should fear Ghanaian voters’ collective thumb.
Only two weeks ago, I pointed at how Akufo-Addo fell from one million votes in 2016 to half a million votes in 2020 to minus 1.5 million votes in 2024.
Optics have a way of staying in the mind for a long time.
Code
Only a week ago, I warned that the President’s Code of Conduct for his appointees might remain paper tiger if the guilt or otherwise of offending ministers and other appointees is left to the say-so of National Democratic Congress (NDC)/NPP reps in their shouting matches on radio and TV talk shows.
In Sammy Gyamfi’s “Dollar-gate”, the party voices have won.
It’s the President who decides whom he pronounces guilty, not what NGOs, faith groups and other voices of reason think the verdict should be.
I will not deceive myself that there are anti-Sammy Gyamfi Ghanaians whose shouts of “hateful crucifixion” are purely on party lines.
One reason accounts for their hatred of the young man.
Sammy Gyamfi is the thorn they have been praying for years that God would remove from active politics. For them, his tongue is too acerbic.
He, Felix Kwakye Ofosu and Okudzeto Ablakwa were among the young men in the NDC whom Rawlings referred to as “Babies with sharp teeth”.
Their sharp teeth sink deep into the flesh, often penetrating the bone and marrow, because 80 per cent to 90 per cent of the time, their attacks are rooted in well-researched evidence.
Their NPP opposites are Gideon Boako and Miracles Aboagye.
These babies have adult siblings in Asiedu Nketia, Afenyo Markin, and Arthur Kennedy, who said of Rawlings that “he has grown old without growing up”.
These aside, however, there are millions of others who genuinely think that the President has allowed Sammy Gyamfi to escape too easily. I am one of them.
I personally think that President Mahama should, at the very least, have publicly reprimanded Sammy Gyamfi. My reason is that US$800 is no chicken change in Ghana.
The manner in which the Goldbod CEO, on the spur of the moment, went into his car and counted the dollars, “wham, wham wham”, is a public display of opulence.
A crowd had formed around them. His act was like a millionaire saying, “money is not my problem; spending it is my problem”.
Are there Ghanaians with so many disposal dollars “in this Ghana which we live in it?”
No wonder, our cedi falls so heavily, so often.
The writer is the Executive Director,
Centre for Communication and Culture.
E-mail: ashonenimil@gmail.com
