Hear Me Out, Mr. Rawlings: A Crab Does Not Beget A Bird!

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

Among the Akan, there is a saying that “A crab does not beget a bird.” It is for this fundamental fact of life that many of us find it very difficult to brook the perennially running self-righteous anger of former President Jerry John Rawlings at the Mills-Mahama administration (See “Ghanaians Are Abusing Political Pluralism – President Rawlings” Modernghana.com 12/28/11).

Thus when he imperiously asserts that the Mills-Mahama government has ratcheted up the general level of malfeasance and corruption in the country to unprecedented heights, the former dictator is only acknowledging what Ghanaians have always known about the history of the Rawlings-led Provisional/National Democratic Congress (P/NDC). In brief, there can be no gainsaying the fact that Mr. Rawlings has phenomenally contributed to the rampancy of the gross language of personal abuse and abject disrespect for authority and the elderly that continues to ride high and uncontrollably on our national political landscape.

In an unarguably large measure, it was such rancorous atmosphere as systematically and deliberately nurtured by the P/NDC that precipitated such gruesome human carnage as the Yendi Affair. And so, really, it is rather annoying to hear the man who masterminded the barbaric assassination of the Ghanaian high court judges and the retired Ghana Army major, and who continues to be protected by the patently illegal Indemnity Clause inserted into the 1992 Constitution, call for a massive investigation of the Kufuor-led government of the New Patriotic Party (NPP).

Indeed, were he a self-respecting and conscientious statesman, rather than a vengeful megalomaniac, Mr. Rawlings would have squarely focused his so-called December 31st lecture on how to resuscitate the national educational system, whose thorough destruction he facilitated in no small measure. It is also rather insulting to the intelligence of well-meaning Ghanaian citizens when the man who has oppressed and abused the Ghanaian people far more than any other head-of-state, cynically faults the country’s robust democratic culture for inordinately fostering the sort of corruption and political abuse which Mr. Rawlings singularly practiced with impunity for some two protracted decades.

You see, a culture of dictatorial silence rigidly enforced largely as a means of ensuring one’s personal political entrenchment, is not exactly the moral equivalent of responsible leadership and collective national discipline. Rather, what this cancerous sort of leadership abuse produced in Ghanaian society was to perennially and systematically induce a veritable culture of “mass stupidity” deliberately cultivated as an inescapable means of guaranteeing a remarkable modicum of personal safety among Ghanaian citizens at large. If this is what Mr. Rawlings vaingloriously equates with a salutary national development agenda, then, perhaps, what Ghanaians ought to be discussing presently is the imperative need to establish more psychiatric centers as a means of restoring our collective national sense of sanity and moral integrity.

I also don’t quite know exactly what Chairman Rawlings means by pontifically asserting that: “There is still a slim window of opportunity to redeem the party [i.e. the National Democratic Congress].” The fact of the matter is that besides the constantly uneasy reminder that Ghana’s equivalent of Boko Haram may unarguably be the most sophisticated of its kind in the entire West African sub-region, there is not much that is admirable or redeeming about either the history or ideological pursuit and achievements of the so-called National Democratic Congress and its twin antecedents of June 4th and December 31st.

There is also no remarkable evidence, whatsoever, indicating that the largely passive and servile sounding boards of the pseudo-Marxist PNDC “Defense Committees” have had any far-reaching impact on the Danquah-Busia-minted concept and operation of the decentralized Local Government System in colonial and postcolonial Ghana. To be certain the latter, which has constituted the essence of democratic decentralization since the colonial era, is what makes the Danquah-Busia-Dombo Tradition foremost in the development of Ghanaian democracy, and the modernization of the traditional African system of governance.

If, indeed, in the opinion of Mr. Rawlings, “Ghanaians are abusing political pluralism,” then, of course, it is largely because adherents of the so-called National Democratic Congress, who ought to have effectively been retired from our national political landscape and culture have, instead, flagrantly hijacked the same and are making an indescribable mess of the system and, in the process, making Ghanaians suffer unpardonable and untenable misery.

*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 “Selected Political Writings” (Lulu.com, 2008). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net.

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