The Political Colossus Called John Dramani Mahama, new President of the Republic of Ghana

I was previewing old tapes for footage to do a documentary on President Jerry Rawlings when he died in 2020. One of the videos struck me. It was the arrival of President Rawlings from a foreign trip which saw the red carpet laid out on the airport tarmac for him whilst key ministers lined up to welcome him with handshakes.

As I viewed the arrival scenes, I spotted a gentleman who took a position around the opened doors to the VVIP lounge and was calmly watching the scenarios. He was a deputy minister who was probably not shortlisted to the tarmac for the exchanges of felicitation that would occur.

So this bespectacled and unassuming gentleman took the back seat in the wake of the conventional seniority roles that was invoked by the State’s Protocol. He also came across as handsome and a promising politician. He was serving as a deputy to Ekwow Spio Garbrah in the Communications Ministry.

Still on the tape I picked up from the library shelves of the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation, GBC, the pensive-looking, physically-in-the-background, John Dramani Mahama clapped and raised his palms to his face and watched the heights his seniors had attained in silence. Judging by the footage, it looked like the man had his mind settled on the circumstances of the day, not looking like guided by wild ambitions. Indeed, if anything at all, his condition looked more like counting his stars as lucky for this was a unique privilege of partaking in the government led by Rawlings as a junior minister.

It is reported that the then little known John Dramani Mahama was poached by the heavyweights of the prominent political party in Ghana called National Democratic Congress, NDC.

The vacant seat of Bole-Bamboi constituency in the Northern Savannah region prompted internal calls for John Dramani Mahama to be chosen to vie for the seat. Dr Obed Asamoah who was leaving the Foreign Ministry as its longest serving minister to become Attorney-General and Minister of Justice in the last term of President Rawlings from 1996 to 2001, had a conversation about Mahama with Rawlings. Before the elections, the two had agreed and assigned the First Lady, Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings to lead the team to go to Mahama and talk him into the parliamentary contest.

Mahama was a staff member of the Japanese Embassy in Ghana at the time. To cut a long story short, he respected the call of the party’s highest echelons and the rest became a history that now is the foundation of a spectacular journey of the young Mahama.

As the co-pilot of the communication ministry, Dr Ekwow Spio Garbrah and him steered Ghana to the unfamiliar realms of the revolution taking place in the sector and that kick-started the process of digitizing communication systems, away from the analogue approach to things. The switch injected speed and efficiency into communications as exemplified in the wide gap between the use of the typewriter and the uptake of the internet.

Then there was the landline telephone which used to be a status symbol and a luxury restricted to government offices and well-to-do homes. Readers would recall that the mobile phone blast occurred in the mid-90s, after the gradual lift through the stages, one of which was pay call. Today, almost everybody in Ghana on the move has a telephone handset. Well, John Dramani Mahama’s sterling political career is meteoric. Even as a Deputy Minister, the sitting President elected him to represent him at some functions the President could not attend.

In 1997, John Dramani Mahama “stood in the shoes” of President Rawlings as the special guest of honour at Battor Aveyime in the Volta region of Ghana to inaugurate a variety of development projects in that catchment area.

If he was not acting on the delegated powers of his superiors, what could a deputy communications minister have been doing there? Those who mistook the woman with ethereal beauty in his company for a girlfriend hit on the wrong note of the piano. Lordina Mahama was and is still his wife.

Again, John Dramani Mahama became the surrogate of President Rawlings who had some frictions with sections of the media. The initial media encounter of his attendance was the 8th Ghana Journalists Awards in Accra.

In 1999 when the event was held, John Dramani Mahama was the substantive minister of Communications. His previous boss had also been shifted to the hot-seat in the Ministry of Education. President Rawlings was on his way to Libya on a duty tour.

However, the NDC lost the general elections which marked an epoch in Ghana’s political history as Rawlings stepped down after nearly two decades. The New Patriotic Party, NPP, took over the reigns of government with John Agyekum Kufuor as the new president.

How can the NDC come back was the main question after it came under the rubble? Whilst in the heat of the difficult elections, Dr Spio Garbrah was in national television studios debating and making meaning of the new data which were emerging, John Dramani Mahama had reservations for the 8- year long haul ahead which as a lawmaker he played roles in legislation and the political cross-firing held under the aegis of Institute of Economic Affairs, IEA. He became the toast of the public and it was just a matter of time for the political womb to re-engineer the new offspring who was to take the political scene by storm.

The task of capturing the commanding heights of political power which appeared a tantalizing mirage to the quest of NDC, was plucked this time around when Mahama became the third running mate of Prof. John Atta Mills. NDC was back in power in 2009. The subtle charisma of Mahama at play and helping to turn the tables on that occasion.

Tragedy struck in July 2012. President John Atta Mills unfortunately died and Mahama, his vice, assumed the mantle in compliance of the Constitution. He went on to win the December, 2012 elections but lost the chance to a second term in 2016. He is back after 8 years in the “active wilderness” to take over from his bitter rival President Nana Akufo Addo who is alleged to have said Mahama was finished politically.

Mahama foresaw his dramatic comeback in a video animation promo that buzzed the scene in 2016. In it, he was the bus driver of passengers who wavered to his keen competitors by jumping off his bus.

The bus driver had all the patience under the sun to monitor those who parted ways with him to see their downfall. Exuding his trademark decorum and calmness, they rushed back to him, and he also re-admitted his betrayers. This looks like the imagery that has found full expression in reality with his landslide victory in 2024. Nobody predicted this feat in 2016, which now has etched a firm place in history.

The only person to hold the staff of the office of a president and swear the sacred oath to the highest office of the land three times. His achievements have come home to roost, not when the massive infrastructural projects undertaken by his first team are still making the rounds.

He found a place in the good books of anti-corruption crusader and exponent of social justice, President Jerry John Rawlings who at his coronation at the University for Development Studies, UDS in Tamale, Northern Ghana, likened the leadership style of President Mahama to what pertains in some advanced democracies. Mahama, a respected politician in the global space, became one of the inaugural joint Chairpersons for the United Nations Eminent Persons on the Sustainable Development Goals, SDGs.

Incidentally, the European nation of Norway which President Rawlings cited in his recommendation of Mahama, took the other seat on the SDGs. Klieg lighting was shed on its primordial, the Millennium Development Goals, MDGs, in New York in 2013, with Ghana’s President John Dramani Mahama and the then British Prime Minister, now the Foreign Secretary, Sir David Cameron selected by global thought leaders to lead the Heads of Governments debate which was moderated by CNN’s Richard Quest.

The main issues facing the Mahama-led administration are controlling high inflation, fighting corruption, ensuring social justice by bridging social inequality gaps, restoring discipline and patriotism in the body politic, reorganizing and mobilizing the youth to a trajectory which is progressive, and retuning Ghanaian minds to their cultural heritage.

It was in his time Ghana hit the highest growth rate of 15 percent in 2011, then the fastest growing economy in the world. That belt evokes a nostalgia in citizens and global investor community and they would probably like to court his new administration.

By Napoleon Ato Kittoe 

NB: The Writer was a presidential reporter under Jerry John Rawlings (1997-2001), John Atta Mills (2009-2013), & John Dramani Mahama (2012-2016). Ghana Broadcasting Corporation.