Is This An Akan Thing Or What?

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

I have no problem, whatsoever, hearing Rawlings gush adamantly about sticking to his largely self-righteous principles of the so-called December 31st Revolution - namely, probity, accountability, transparency, freedom and justice. My dear reader, you just can add the rest. "Some of us cannot and will never depart from the principles that led to the revolution and sustained it for so long. We shall continue to confront the rot that is eroding the values many laid down their lives for. The struggle continues!," he was recently quoted to be saying (See "Rawlings Missing at 31 Dec. Revolution Commemoration" Citifmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 12/31/13).

What indescribably annoys me, however, is the fact that the fast-aging rascal should so routinely and cavalierly presume to fool Ghanaians into thinking, and believing that, indeed, there were any such thing as a "revolution" that really occurred under his watch. At best, both June 4, 1979 and December 31, 1981 could be characterized as a "devolution," in the biological sense of the word. For what Ghanaians have endured through these two disruptive moments in our political culture and lives have been a patent and, in retrospect, an apparently irreversible degeneration of our moral values at virtually every level of our collective existence.

It is also rather amusing to hear Mr. Rawlings grandstand about some so-called principles having "sustained our revolution for so long." Maybe the old perennially self-deluded upstart and mutineer does not realize that those of us avid students and observers of postcolonial Ghanaian history remember quite well the remarkable number of coup-detats engineered in a justifiable attempt to unseat him and his wicked band of unconscionable robber barons.

In essence, it was the heavy military support that his Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) junta received from Libya's Col. Gadhafy, Cuba's Mr. Fidel Castro, and elsewhere, that enabled Mr. Rawlings to so callously and recklessly foist his veritable reign-of-terror on Ghanaians for as long as it lasted, and not because of any staunch and honest upholding of any positive and revolutionary principles of sterling leadership.

I also don't know about the purported "rot that is [currently] eroding the values that many [Ghanaians] laid down their lives for." For it is an indisputable fact that it was the former Ghana Airforce pilot himself who created, almost single-handedly, and doggedly championed the present state of rank corruption and abject lack of accountability that we are all suffering in various degrees, ranging from socioeconomic, cultural and iconically or image-wise. That he has callously wasted countless otherwise promising, creative and productive Ghanaian lives in the process of imposing his gross leadership incompetence on us, is what he and the rest of the entire nation ought to be talking about.

For example, what kind of an upright leader enrolls his own children in expensive private schools while he smugly presides over the total degeneration of our public educational system? And also ships his own children and relatives abroad, while he cynically shutters our three or four public institutions of higher learning? What is even more nauseating to painfully observe is the incontrovertible fact that of the four administrations that have, so far, constituted Ghana's Fourth Republic, the three most regressive and rudderless, as well as most corrupt, have all been headed by Mr. Rawlings and leaders directly and personally mentored by him.

I hate to say this but, nevertheless, feel compelled to say it: I really don't know whether this is an especial Akan thing or trait - and I am not the least bit perturbed, whatsoever, to be accused of the crime of ethnic chauvinism or tribalism - but it well appears as if Mr. Rawlings has absolutely no sense of shame or dignity. This is what troubles me most. Because outsiders listening to him wax so vacuously and pointlessly and, of course, shamelessly, may be erroneously tempted to envisage his inexcusably pathetic views to be representative of those of Ghanaian citizens at large.

The fact of the matter, though, is that no Akan leader (not even Mr. Kennedy Agyepong) talks quite like Mr. Rawlings. And that is an indisputable fact. I can't speak for the rest, particularly, those leaders from the non-Akan and non-Mamprusi areas up-north and across the great river to the east. Of course, I also quite reasonably recognize the exceptions to even remarkably provable ethnic stereotypes. Nonetheless, it is also quite obvious that President John Dramani Mahama's gratuitous and smugly visionless pronouncements have far more in common with the views and pronouncements of Mr. Rawlings than all else. I may well be mistaken, but I am also mindful of that time-tested maxim that, indeed, a crab does not beget a bird. And also that birds of identical plumage flock together. Happy New Year!

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

Department of English

Nassau Community College of SUNY

Garden City, New York

Dec. 31, 2013

E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

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