Bawumiah Is Finally Where He Actually Belongs!

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

In the wake of his rather laudable lecture presentation commemorating the tragic passing of Mr. Ferdinand Ayim (I still keep my late cousin’s complimentary card in my wallet), the Anlo Mafia-sponsored Daily Post newspaper published a characteristically desultory editorial that sought to impugn the sanity and integrity of the Vice-Presidential Candidate of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) – (See “Bawumiah Has Caught The NPP Plague” Modernghana.com 5/3/12).

Among the plethora of total nonissues covered in the rather flimsy editorial, Mr. Michael “Trokosi” Dokosi, the editor-publisher of the Daily Post, had the temerity to half-truthfully observe as follows: “Obviously, Bawumiah, born into a CPP family and tutored by a father who eventually became NDC [sic] has sadly caught the NPP plague and learnt the ways of the elephants. He has thus started speaking like them. It is so sad to hear an intellectual like him speaking like the party’s Deputy Communications Director, Sammy Awuku. His father must be turning in his grave.”

Needless to say, some honest Ghanaian citizen ought to remind the Anlo-Mafia boys that Alhaji Mumuni Bawumiah, Dr. Mahamadu Bawumiah’s late father, was first and foremost a member of the Danquah and Grant-founded United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC), the seminal and cross-ethnic modern Ghanaian political party, before the old man was deviously and regrettably lured into the top echelons of the breakaway and nominally tautological Convention People’s Party (CPP). He would suffer the same humiliating experiences endured by the likes of Messrs. Ako-Adjei, Adamafio and Crabbe.

And on the preceding score, of course, must be promptly pointed out that it was in the much-maligned United Gold Coast Convention that the future Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah cut his practical political teeth and was generously introduced by Dr. Kwame Kyeretwie Boakye-Danquah into the mainstream of colonial Ghanaian politics. And so, really, Dr. Bawumiah’s all-too-sound and natural decision to return to the New Patriotic Party, the only authentic ideological scion of the erstwhile UGCC, simply means that the internationally recognized economist and former Deputy Governor of the Bank of Ghana has finally settled among the ranks of his own.

We must also enlighten those who are too young to remember that the history of the Anlo-Mafia founders of the so-called National Democratic Congress, and their knavish and opportunistic non-Ewe allies, is palpably and cringingly one of classical terrorism of the first order. And, indeed, it is rather wickedly amusing for anti-Ghanaian Ewe nationalists like Mr. Michael “Trokosi” Dokosi to wax eloquent and almost rapturous about the Nkrumah-led Convention People’s Party.

The grim fact of the matter is that in the wake of their crushing electoral defeat in the UN-sponsored 1956 Plebiscite (or referendum), that witnessed the formal annexation of the erstwhile Trans-Volta British Togoland by the soon-to-be Republic of Ghana, the Anlo-Ewe Mafia, eager to be reunited with their Togolese kinsmen and clanswomen, resorted to an open season of terror bombings that, in retrospect, makes Nigeria’s Boko Haram and Osama Bin Ladin’s Al-Qaeda network seem like children’s Christmas fireworks organizations.

It is the foregoing flagrant and indubitably inglorious history of the Anlo-Ewe Mafia which unconscionable rascals like Mr. Michael “Trokosi” Dokosi ought to be writing and publishing reams of apologies about, if, indeed, the Rawlings posse wants to be taken seriously on its dubious claim to patriotic Ghanaian citizenship. Needless to say, the post-1956 Plebiscite Anlo-Mafia Reign of Terror, which targeted the person of then-Prime Minister Nkrumah, would culminate in the retaliatory assassination of Togo’s President Sylvanus Olympio.

As for the Daily Post’s cock-and-bull story regarding how the Kufuor-led New Patriotic Party had to, purportedly, negotiate for the garage sale of Ghana Telecom in order “to raise the paltry sum of $130,000 [one-hundred-and-thirty-thousand American dollars]” to kick-start a badly ailing economy, I guess this is the kind of economic theory that finds the Dufuor boys having wet-dreams about the Mills-led government of the so-called National Democratic Congress having chalked an unprecedented economic growth, even as the unemployment rate dangerously hovers about the screaming vicinity of 60-percent; a bogus economic theory that had better be kept among the ranks of fanatical NDC cynics and hotheads.

*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 Director of The Sintim-Aboagye Center for Politics and Culture and author of “Danquah v. Nkrumah: In the Words of Mahoney.” E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net. ###