By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
March 19, 2016
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
I have been, literally, laughing cats-and-dogs, as the trite cliché goes, all day long. Actually, I began having this marathon, albeit intermittent, good laugh since last night, after reading about the misspelling of the last, or family, name of President John Dramani Mahama as “Mahami” (actually “Miami” sounds better) in the program brochure of the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, where the Gonja petty chieftain had been scheduled to be conferred with a Doctor of Laws (Honoris Causa) Degree – not an Honorary Doctor of Law Degree – as the New Patriotic Party-leaning Daily Guide newspaper reported the same (See “Printer’s Devil Hits Mahama In Scotland” Ghanaweb.com 3/19/16).
Well, it was rather gracious of Mr. Mahama to have dedicated his award to the good people of Ghana, his wife and his family, except that I did not in my heart of hearts believe that the Ghanaian people that President Mahama addressed in that great and revered Scottish academy included the people of Akyem-Abuakwa, except for one or two Afropean traitors like the Smiths of Kukurantumi, the very people one of whose greatest twentieth-century sons and citizens, in the distinguished personality of Dr. Joseph (Kwame Kyeretwie) Boakye-Danquah, singularly championed the cause for the establishment of our beloved country’s flagship academy, the University of Ghana, which insufferably disrespectful leaders like Little Dramani attended sometime during the late 1970s and early 1980s.
We, Akyemfuo, do not feel a part of President Mahama’s Aberdeen encomium because the Gonja Boy (no I didn’t say “Ganja Boy,” at least not this time around) has callously and unconscionably supervised the wanton and untold destruction of Akyem lands, particularly Akyem-Abuakwa lands, by the predatory activities of illegal mining or Galamsey, with reckless abandon. And not only that, Mr. Mahama has also had a great kick out of the massive destruction of the economic vitality of Okyeman by even calling Kyebi, the Akyem-Abuakwa Royal Capital, the Galamsey Capital of Ghana, and beaming with regal pride as he volleyed such emotionally and morally blistering verbal abuse in the very Chamber of the Okyeman Council. I don’t know why they didn’t let the infamous Shit-Bomber lick the paws of one of those stuffed leopards at the foot of the Okyenhene.
Even as I write this early Saturday morning, my kinsmen and women at Nsawam-Adoagyiri, one of the at least four royal stools of which I am a legitimate claimant, are desperately struggling against their systematic Bantustanization by the government of the Jerry Rawlings-founded so-called National Democratic Congress (NDC). Even as I write, nearly 800 acres of farmlands belonging to some three, or so, township communities making up the Adoagyiri Traditional Area, have been wickedly expropriated, in the dubious name of Eminent Domain, and literally handed over to Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings, the wife and criminal partner of Chairman Jerry John Rawlings, the widely purported sacrificial revolutionary, who intends to turn these “legally” stolen indigenous lands into her private industry. I intend to shortly and fully address this most heinous of crimes of modern-day enslavement of the people of Akyem-Abuakwa. I am quite certain that the indigenous lands of other bona fide Ghanaian citizens elsewhere in the country have been meted the same kleptocratic and slavocratic treatment. There will be hell to pay somewhere along the line, trust me.
What we have here, in essence, is the very same system of wanton African expropriation and downright enslavement that prevailed under South Africa’s white-racist Apartheid regime. In exchange for the summary seizure of our ancestral landed properties, my Adoagyiri kinsmen and women now have to prepare to live life as veritable tenants and hostages on their own age-old landed properties and literally work as slaves for the economic comfort of the blood-drinking and theft-prone Rawlings Clan.
Which was why I couldn’t stop myself from having a good laugh when I recently read the otherwise morally wrenching story of the people of West Papua, Indonesia, a handful of whose tribal leaders, including one of that Indonesian region’s most prominent chieftains, who participated in Ghana’s 59th Independence Anniversary Commemoration festivities, and had reportedly petitioned the Mahama-led government of the National Democratic Congress to help them to reassert their sovereignty from the crushing suzerainty of Indonesia. They will have a far greater chance of realizing their dream if they return to Accra next year to witness President Akufo-Addo and Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia celebrate Ghana’s 60th Independence Anniversary Commemoration.
Indeed, if somebody more politically sober had traveled just 20 miles up-north to Nsawam-Adoagyiri with our Black-Indonesian brothers and sisters to witness, first hand, the inexcusably wretched state of my kinsfolk and relatives, these latter-day freedom fighters would almost definitely have had second thoughts and rue the very moment they came to the rather bizarre conclusion, rather naively, that they could count on the leaders of the Mahama-led National Democratic Congress to help them free themselves and their mineral-rich land and people from Indonesian colonial subjugation.
*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs
