By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
You see, you are often better off in not attempting to comment on the public rants of the man who turned Ghana into a veritable Police State for some twenty long years. For strongman Jeremiah John Rawlings is invariably incoherent and at best simply annoying. This time, however, he got almost everything right. The Ghana News Agency (GNA) article was sensationally captioned “J J Goes Wild” (Ghanaweb.com 7/1/08), which was true but rather unnecessarily loud. For in no polite society, and under no circumstances, is a clinical lunatic called out by his or her accolade or praise-name; doing so inartistically detracts from both the divine art of language and etiquette.
This time around, though, the fast-aging Butcher-of-Dzelukope had it right, except that he also had it upside-down, which means that the critical reader had to read everything backwards in order to vividly get the big picture, as it were. For instance, the life-proprietor of the so-called Provisional National Democratic Congress (P/NDC), otherwise known as the Rawlings Corporation (R. C. Unlimited), was dead-on accurate in observing the fact that Old Sleepy Eyes was as intent on thwarting the presidential campaign of the flagbearer of his own New Patriotic Party (NPP) just as much as Mr. Eagle Eyes was determined to render such negative efforts as superfluous as a dam-full of water on the back of a duck. Then also, somebody forgot to alert Old Sleepy Eyes to the fact that while, indeed, the cat may have nine lives, Mr. Eagle Eyes actually has 45 lives which, in effect, means that to scuttle the highly auspicious chances of Mr. Eagle Eyes taking Ghana well into twenty-first century and first-world political culture, Old Sleepy Eyes needs at least ten space shuttles, not two presidential jet-liners. For the people of Ghana have gone far beyond those dewy CPP days, when civilization was something one only saw captured either on a postcard or a Christmas card. These days, Ghanaians are mature enough to appreciate the fact that, indeed, Election 2008 is not a petty and regressive contest of personalities but, rather, an ideological contest between democratic progress, as represented by the New Patriotic Party (NPP), Old Sleepy Eyes’ erratic political foolery notwithstanding, and the old stone-age politics fearfully and criminally represented by the AK-47-embossed umbrella of the so-called Provisional National Democratic Congress (P/NDC). In other words, come December 7, 2008, Ghanaians would be making a choice between SHIT-BOMBING and being able to, once again, use their hitherto discarded wallets and be able to go to the bank to withdraw as much money as they have in the bank or they need without hiring ten armed body guards.
To be certain, it is precisely for the foregoing reasons that Nana Akufo-Addo has proposed to double the size of the Ghana Police Service (GPS). For with a population of approximately 24 million, Ghana needs at least a policing strength of roughly 40,000, well-complemented by both a voluntary and semi-voluntary, or auxiliary, force of about 20,000. That, indeed, is the only way to effectively uproot the P/NDC-sponsored Colombian and local cocaine cartels from our streets and our country at large.
Rather pathetically, in his latest outburst of frustration, for the sources of his ill-gotten wealth appear to be fast drying up, Mr. Rawlings accused Nana Akufo-Addo of seeking to turn Ghana into a “Police State,” simply because the NPP flagbearer intends to effectively put the twenty years of P/NDC terrorism into the footnotes of postcolonial Ghanaian history books. But even more significantly, perhaps, somebody ought to remind the man who executed more Ghanaians by firing squad, including Supreme Court judges, that the “Culture of Silence” which, for twenty years, created deaf-mutes and virtual zombies out of bona fide Ghanaian citizens was exactly what a veritable “Police State” is primarily about. And this is why I was uncontrollably elated that both Messrs. Rawlings and Atta-Mills turned down the most recent “KUFUWARDS,” otherwise called the National-Merit Awards/Honors. All jokes aside, this couple of Bad-Cop, Good-Cop – or Jekyll and Hyde – infamy knew in their proverbial heart-of-hearts that they did not half deserve their “KUFUWARDS.”
Indeed, we have gone down this nasty road with the Butcher-of-Dzelukope before, yet as my good friend Eric Bottah (a.k.a. Oyokoba) recently pointed out in one of his often insightful comments in the Ghanaweb.com chat-room, Flt.-Lt. Jeremiah John Rawlings has consistently and gratuitously accused the Kufuor government, of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP), of having a hand in the savage murder of Ya-Na Yakubu Andani, obviously because in Mr. Rawlings’ bloody and hallucinatory mind, doing so would make him appear not to be the aberration and thoroughgoing abomination that he has made of himself on the postcolonial Ghanaian political landscape. You see, as our elders observed eons ago, “Misery Craves Company,” and so in his quite logical bid to meliorating his “MacBethan” state of misery, the man with, in Shakespearean parlance, the “incarnadine” hands finds himself with absolutely no alternative but to normalize himself by being able to point to others, particularly a presidential peer, and facilely, albeit falsely, gloating, “Hey folks, here is my identical twin.” Unfortunately for Jato-Dzelukope, it appears that the closest he would ever come to claiming “bloody” kinship with any Ghanaian premier, past or present, is the person of ex-“Vice”-President John Evans Atta-Mills.
It is also significant to observe, at least in passing, that this writer has fully availed himself of the Wuaku Commission Report, and is proud to note, even as legions of other Ghanaian scholars and intellectuals have done before him, that absolutely nowhere in the quite comprehensive afore-referenced report is any executive member of the ruling New Patriotic Party implicated in Ya-Na Yakubu Andani’s regicide, with the inevitable exception of NPP stalwarts who are also bona fide members and/or close associates of the Dagbon Royal Family; but so have some NDC stalwarts with links to the same family been implicated. And here must also be highlighted the fact that the March 2002 Bugum-Festival provoked carnage was purely an intra-ethnic and intra-familial affair, and so it goes beyond logic and common sense how a man who ruled Ghana for 20 years, with proverbial iron-clad fists, could arrive at such patently bizarre conclusion, more so in view of the fact that the Yendi chieftaincy dispute far predates Ghana’s independence from British colonialism! There has also arisen the question of why none of the Wuaku Commission-fingered suspects have so far being made to face the Ghanaian judicial system; and the simple answer is that: “Mr. Tsatsu Tsikata alone has spent the last six years stalling the entire Ghanaian judicial process, with the criminal complicity of Mr. Rawlings, Prof. Atta-Mills and the entire hoodlum lot of the P/NDC.”
But, perhaps, the more relevant question to pose is the following: Who has during the last six years provoked machete-related conflicts among his political minions in the Northern Region? There can only be one answer to this question; and it is: RAWLINGS!!!
We are also just wondering about the last time that Mr. Rawlings picked up any well-researched book on contemporary Ghanaian history and politics to read, before issuing such bunk and abject crap as staunch adherents of the Danquah-Busia Tradition “demonstrating grave hatred for Dr. Kwame Nkrumah and frowning upon his fight for our independence.” One can almost guarantee Mr. Rawlings writing his memoirs one of these days and criminally claiming to have single-handedly fought for the establishment of Fourth-Republican Ghanaian Democracy. You see, when you have such an intellectually obtuse character “ruling” a country for twenty years, this is exactly what one gets, arrant nonsense and sophomoric fabrications!
*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is the author of 17 books, including “Dr. J. B. Danquah: Architect of Modern Ghana” (iUniverse.com, 2005). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@aol.com.
