By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Mr. Kwabena 'Wiredu has the luxury now to brag about having worked hard to acquire some 53 heavy-duty trucks, only to have the ownership of the same viciously and mischievously credited to the blow-hard General-Secretary of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC). Back in 1979, when the Rawlings-led Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) mutineered by shooting its way into the old slave castle at Osu-Accra, the then seat of governance, the Kasoa-based businessman would have been arraigned before one of the Tsatsu Tsikata-fangled Public Tribunals and, in 1982, the People's Courts, to account for every single pesewa that went into the acquisition of those trucks (See "Asiedu Nketia Cleared Again" Ghanaweb.com 4/5/14).
Make no mistake, the odious public tribunals and people's courts had everything to do with anything but justice. He would also have been labeled a thief and a congenital liar and then thrown into the slammer, and his properties confiscated by the state for the exclusive use of the Trokosi Mafia. Then also, Mr. Owiredu would have been labeled an enemy of the state. For in both 1979 and 1982, it constituted the height of an heinous crime for any Ghanaian with an Akan name to have acquired the sort of substantial vehicular wealth attributed to the Kasoa resident.
I am quite certain that Mr. Owiredu has heard of the late Mr. Siaw, owner of Tata Brewery. Such was the treatment meted him. Recently, an avid reader of my columns wrote to inform me that I might have been related to Mr. Siaw on my father's side of the family, through my recently discovered ancestral township of Amuana-Praso. The latter, of course, also means that some part of the Siaw family hails from the Asona Clan of Asante Dwaben.
But the preceding is not my concern today. Rather, what concerns me presently is the apparently curious refusal of Mr. Owiredu to acknowledge the obvious; and the obvious fact of the matter is that the joke is not on the real owner of the aforementioned vehicular properties, but on those who have spent the better part of their adult careers, largely on the political front, maligning and crucifying innocent, hardworking and responsible Ghanaian citizens.
What needs emphasizing here, more than all else, is the incontrovertible fact that Mr. Johnson Asiedu-Nketia is not an innocent Ghanaian citizen. His hands are as bloody as the man who made him the epic and peevish political operative that he has become in the country today. And, by the way, dear reader, I attended St. Peter's Secondary School (PERSCO) with a couple of the Siaw children. Back then, I was their unknown but locally celebrated poor cousin.
In retrospect, though, had I known the Siaw children, their plight and "revolutionary burden" and grief would also have become my own. But, at least, it would have given me a real and palpable cause to go onto the warpath to ensure that Mr. Rawlings and his Trokosi-Mafia thugs would not live as long as they have, unbearably long enough to thumb their noses at the rest of us hardworking, responsible and forward-looking Ghanaians.
I was not the least bit happy about Mr. Asiedu-Nketia's trumping of the editors and publisher of the New Patriotic Party-leaning Daily Guide newspaper, being that General Mosquito, as he is popularly called, has publicly admitted to have sold criminally over-priced cement blocks to the Bui Dam Authority (BDA) as a contractual supplier in competition with others. But, I guess, the Daily Guide proprietor and her staff were rather too facile and cavalier in their legal tussle with the Mosquito.
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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
April 6, 2014
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
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