Nana Konadu dances to her own tune

By Dr. Michael J.K. Bokor

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Nana Konadu Agyemang-Rawlings is in tatters and is a sight for sore eyes.

She is vigorously dancing the Azonto dance on the political scene to the tune that she herself has called. We are enjoying the spectacle but hope that she won’t dance herself lame before the actual dancing beginsh.

Does she deserve anybody’s pity? No, at least, not mine. She will cry all she wants to, fume all she wants to, and parade the corridors of the judiciary all she has the nerves to; but the end will not be any better than the beginning or middle for her political career. Or for her standing in the estimation of the Ghanaian citizenry. For her, the end won’t justify the means.

The overarching question is not about her disqualification by the Electoral Commission from contesting the Presidential elections but it is about why she thinks that she has what Ghanaians are looking for in their leaders and must pester state institutions to serve her purposes. I will return to this issue.

In all senses, Nana Konadu is reaping what she has sown and deserves nothing but concentrated contempt and extremely cold shoulders form the large majority who see her as a bugbear. And a bugbear she is!

Those who see her as a matriarch are free to join her staccato rhythm. After all, to them, she is the one to be obeyed without question. But thy are all leading themselves nowhere, causing more commotion than motion.

In her latest show of misplaced resilience or foolhardiness, she is in court to force a river to flow upstream. How pathetic doesn’t she come across, swimming against a current in the Roaring Forties!!

Here is the latest torn feather in her cap (or the beret of the 31st December Women’s Movement that sits jauntily on her bushy hair):

“The National Democratic Party has filed an application at the Human Rights division of the High Court seeking an order of mandamus to force the Electoral Commission to carry out its public duty to have their flag-bearer Nana Konadu Agyemang-Rawlings registered as a presidential candidate for the December elections.

“The suit became necessary after the party handed the EC a 24-hour ultimatum to have Nana Konadu Agyemang-Rawlings registered.

“As the ultimatum elapsed Wednesday morning, Deputy Communications Director of the NDP, Hilarious Abiu tells Joy News the party has no other choice than to seek legal action on the case and have their leader registered (Ghanaweb , October 24, 2012).

Dear reader, join me to hoot at the black sheep of Ghana politics as she roams the political landscape defecating on it in protest at what she considers a “human rights abuse,” forgetting that in the process, she is rather soiling her own backside.

She is heading to the Human Rights Court to seek redress, we are told. Human rights? Does Nana Konadu today know what constitutes a “human rights abuse”? Wonders will never end.

Many victims of the era in which she and her husband towered above all else and exerted their draconian selves on the Ghanaian political scene will definitely be turning in their graves or chafing at what is unfolding right in front of their eyes. They had no chance to seek redress because they had no human rights in the workings of the Rawlings regime where Nana Konadu was a force to reckon with.

Here is one woman whose looming presence on the Ghanaian political scene for almost 20 years has left in its trail a motley of bitter-sweet memories—but with more of the “bitter” part than the “sweet” one.

We can recall a few of those bitter ones just to point out why her persistence to contest the elections on the ticket of a political party carved out of the NDC by her (and her doting husband, Jerry Rawlings) is the logical conclusion of a hazardous political journey—which should have made her sober and not vitriolic and demoniacal as she is now and will continue to be till death lays its icy hands on her.

Even though she wasn’t found to be an accomplice in the dastardly abduction and murder of the three High Court judges on June 30, 1982, it came to light that the vehicle that was used by Cpl. Amedeka and his team for that act belonged to her. How it happened to be so is still a mystery.

Do you remember the Djentu guy who had the identification hair-cut characteristic of the military brutality under Rawlings? Yes, he was so treated for daring to have something to do with one of Nana Konadu’s daughters. His “impudence” gave him that identification hair-cut right at the Osu Castle.

Nana Konadu didn’t see anything wrong with that maltreatment nor did she consider it a human rights issue.

Many other excesses that occurred could have excited her compassion or, at least, an intervention to show the mother in her. Yet, she stood aloof with a bated interest while others’ rights were being abused.

Today that her political ambitions have been cut short by her own miscalculation, she is out, throwing temper tantrums for public attention or sympathy.

Have we so soon forgotten the negative impressions that she and her husband have created about the Ghanaian judiciary, telling the whole world that they didn’t trust the judiciary enough to seek redress from it against those making all manner of damaging allegations against them? What has happened now to make them repose so much confidence in that same judiciary in the hope that her disqualification by the EC would be overturned by the Human Rights Court?

I expect the case to be thrown out and Nana Konadu further bruised because that is what she deserves. Was it the EC’s fault that she couldn’t have her nomination form properly filled and endorsed unlike what the other qualified candidates did to meet the EC’s deadline?

Or does she think that her arm-bending tactics will work any magic for her? The odds are heavily stacked against her and she is just wasting her time and everybody’s, pursuing this lost cause at court. I don’t expect anything beneficial from this litigation. In effect, Nana Konadu has no grounds to bother the EC or to threaten it the way she and her lackeys have begun doing.

Does she think that the Human Rights Court will single her out to be given the kind of preferential treatment that will throw the electoral process into disarray and disrepute? Or that the Court will order the EC to go back and undo the harm that she has inflicted on herself?

Can’t Nana Konadu zip up and come to terms with the bigger reality—that she is just not destined to be part of the team to seek the voters’ mandate? And why does she think that she is the only disqualified candidate whose “human rights” have been abused by the EC?

You see, when the gods want to kill people like this black sheep of Ghanaian politics, they don’t first make them mad but they also send them off on suicidal missions. That’s where Nana Konadu is now.

In truth, she is like a wounded tigress; but she has no claws to cause any harm. She doesn’t have any fang either. All she has are active tear glands that will produce bucketfuls of tears as her political fortunes evaporate at her realization that the once waxing Nana Konadu has virtually waned off and been reduced to a pale shadow of her former self. Such is the fate of those who are blinded by raw greed for power and vindictiveness.

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