Josiah Aryeh tells own story

… in book about to hit town soon

Law lecturer, former National Democratic Congress scribe and GaDangme activist Nii Armah Josiah Aryeh, who for sometime now has elected to hibernate in a self-induced political limbo following the change of guards at the NDC headquarters after the party's acrimonious Koforidua Congress will, in the next few weeks, launch a book.

The book will not be on law or and how GaDangme chiefs messed up lands and used monies from those mindless sales of community resources to buy mobile phones and get themselves more women; nor will it be on the plight of university lecturers, who cannot agitate with the same firepower as our now overbearing doctors and nurses who only have to cough for the whole nation to get the virus. The book’s 21 chapters, charts the former General Secretary of the NDC’s life from early education, his life at East London, through the penultimate chapter, Sour Grapes, to Afterword. There is a whole chapter on the founder of the NDC, Rawlings, and a chapter self-descriptively titled, Who Will Cast the Cruellest Stone, through Alive in a Coffin, to Withdrawal.

It is the voice of a man who feels betrayed. The book opens with Psalm 137 (3), “And they that wasted us required of us mirth,” which gives the reader a taste of what to expect.

The preface tells the bitterness that the author has carried with him out of a party he believes he sacrificed so much for. “He worked tirelesslessly and wholeheartedly for the Party. In return he got more than his fair share of pain and disappointment.”

“In my capacity as General Secretary,” says Dr Aryeh, “I was never paid a farthing. My office was denied petty cash and I had no imprest whatsoever. In a word, I was denied the wherewithal to perform. Not even travel and vehicle maintenance allowance were put my way.”

The law lecturer notes, “In saying these, I am aware of seductive propaganda put out to the contrary. I do know also that rather than disprove assertions such as these with solid evidence, the usual style in our country is to get some compromised individual to make a few statements on radio and in the print media with which to further tarnish the victim. It is my intention here to lay that and other falsehoods and wicked inventions to rest once and for all.”

The aura of importance he believes has been invested in his autobiography stems from “the web of lies, conspiracy and betrayal” surrounding the author’s “departure from office as the General Secretary of the nation’s largest opposition party…”

His prolonged and heated differences with Obed Yao Asamoah, who was NDC Chairman when Dr Aryeh was General Secretary, are here chronicled at length. Dr Aryeh describes Dr Obed Asamoah as a man with a determination to destroy.

A cursory reading of the book may deceive the author to think Obed was everything that was wrong with the NDC and with his departure all will be well. Dr Aryeh writes, “There is a canker in the heart of the Party deriving from the ambitions and underhand schemes of one man alone, Obed Asamoah…” a man he describes as a “nasty incubus.”

“Under Obed a sclerosis of objectivity afflicted the Party. Every way to a solution was barred. Internal democracy was manipulated,” says the author. But, the book begins with Obed and ends with Obed: “On 25th July 2006 the Daily Graphic carried a front page story as follows. “The yet-to-be-outdoored Democratic Freedom Party (DFP) has been hit by its first major share of conflict following a stand-off between two party heavyweights over the appointment of interim executives. Party giants Dr Obed Yao Asamoah and Alhaji Mohammed Sani Farl are currently entangled in a political disagreement over who has to chair the party’s interim executive before its first national congress early next year,” he writes in the concluding chapter.

To show that he is ready to sing like a canary, Dr Aryeh warns, “Those who ought to tremble in their boots about revelations of their misdeeds are rather crying from the rooftops. In the meantime, the Party needs to bestir itself fully to confront those who wreck from within and have not the means to put what they destroy back to work. Every institution must heal itself of ruinous tendencies, internally generated. With the Koforidua congress members of the Party appears finally to have rid themselves of the tendency to attack each other from opposing sides of the barricade.”

The author was born just after Independence at Jamestown in Accra in the Year of Our Lord 1958. He captures with captivating ease and superb memory, the period right after Independence, making the book’s release timely, with the golden jubilee anniversary a few months away.

Dr Aryeh is not only an excellent researcher, he writes with the kind of simple majesty, that makes some writers good and their works must-read.

“With Independence came the cult of the State,” he recalls. “It was a cult of power built around independence heroes and their collaborators. The undertones were Messianic. Independence was a victory many found too intoxicating. Party functionaries, still boozed on a brew of independence and new-found financial means, soon started to terrorise sympathisers of the Opposition. Old Ben [a character at James Town] once threatened to light a match on the jaw of a thug who attacked him.”

But, the book is not just an unauthorised biography of Dr Obed Asamoah. Minority Leader Alban Bagbin is also not spared. He headed a committee of inquiry into the allegation that Dr Aryeh accepted money from the New Patriotic Party to defect shortly before the 2004 general elections. Dr Aryeh denies it, in spite of a tape recording of a meeting, which he says has been doctored to ensure his crucifixion. The recording was secretly done by the First Vice Chairman of the NPP at the time, Stephen Ntim.

“The Bagbin Committee found it necessary to rekindle the issue of the killing of women masterminded by opponents of the Rawlings administration and attempted to use it to extricate Kwamena Bartels,” Dr Aryeh writes.

He had accused Kwamena Bartels, who was at the tape-recorded meeting at East Legon, of confessing to NPP leaders conspiring to murder women. A charge which was then seen as laughable, which Dr Aryeh himself describes in the book as “completely irrelevant,” in terms of “pertinence to the issues before the committee.”

He fumes, “How they could use this to bail out a sworn enemy of the NDC is baffling.”

He then lays into the Information Minister. “On the eve of the 2000 election, I had seen Bartels bare his ugliest teeth. He put an advert in The Chronicle describing his opponent for the Ablekuma North constituency seat as ‘a thief’. Malicious as ever, he timed the advert for the last day of election when his opponent would have had no chance whatsoever of responding.” Read more in tomorrow’s edition of The Statesman.