Prof. Aaron Mike Oquaye
“Stiff-necked fools, you think you are cool…Yes, you have got the wrong interpretation, mixed up with vain imagination” (Bob Marley… “Stiff-Necked Fools”).
The potential threat of political casuists to sound democratic principles
Even Prof. Aaron Mike Oquaye, that spent horse, has a divisive snout which helps him make a remarkable presence and partisan political susurrus on the landscape of our political discourse.
The chichidodo bird Prof. Oquaye, the Chairman of Constitutional and Legal Affairs of NPP, again:
“Since this suspension have you heard this kind of things going on, we love that peace and those people who for good reasons and good measure have turned themselves into NDC people and yet pretend to be NPP people, and create division, we know them, the NPP knows them, it’s something that we will not allow, that is the reason why you see a whole president giving so much attention to NPP internal affairs.”
And that is also the reason why you see a whole presidential aspirant, Akufo-Addo, giving so much attention to NDC internal affairs.
It is what they call political equalization. It is what our duopolistic culture feeds on perpetually.
And also how come the internal partisan division, which Prof. Oquaye mentions in passing in his emotionally tainted ideological apologetics, did not suddenly disappear with the largely politically motivated suspensions of Paul Afoko, of Kwabena Agyapong, and of Sammy Crabbe?
A rhetorical question?
Not that we know of!
The other sad though indispensable part of this ideological narrative is that, the fact of the blame-shifting NPP internal affairs not coming out in the open as it reportedly did during the politically motivated interruptions of the active tenures of the politically motivated rusticated Afoko, Agyapong and Crabbe, does not in and of itself completely vindicate Prof. Oquaye’s audacious assertion and its eloquent illogic.
It is probably lost on the outmoded professor that correlation does not necessarily imply causation. In other words he erects the emotional pillar of his central argument on the flimsy foundation of post hoc fallacy.
Far from everything else his drooling political tongue, at best, is a good example of appeal to probability.
At worst if we may also add, it is a figment of his scarred political imagination. This is the kind of imagination his peers in both the NPP and the NDC live with.
In the final analysis then, Prof. Oquaye’s “this kind of things” could have equally emanated from among the bitter hearts and souls of NPP members who may have been sympathetic to Akufo-Addo and his cabal of political gangsters and his party’s vigilante militia, the Invincible Forces for instances, and his Al-Qaeda-like political theologians and praise singers—the so-called camarilla some believe is the active Akyem Mafia.
If that were to be the case, as we strongly suspect to be, then it may as well have been that these diabolic elements within the ethnocentric elephant party immediately ceased bringing Prof. Oquaye’s “this kind of things” out in the open once they had successfully executed the political rustication of the trio.
All these working hypotheses do not necessarily negate Prof. Oquaye’s suspicions. They merely look at the other face of the coin as should be the case in a dialectical thinking. This is not rocket science. Moreover, he may also have been blinded by confirmative bias as this could have undermined any serious quest for inculpatory evidence. This is a big issue in jurisprudence.
Where is Prof. Oquaye’s quantum of evidence? Where are Prof. Oquaye’s standards of evidence?
Again, that kind of strategic maneuver could have been an inside job excellently orchestrated by those skillful Akufo-Addo serpentine acolytes as part of the NPP’s general agitprop politicking against elements within the party suspected of working against the interest of the party and of its flag-bearer, Akufo-Addo.
In intelligence circles, specifically tradecraft, such “insider jobs” operations are technically similar to and fall under the general label or rubric “false flag.”
First off, these NPP members were probably the same persons who may have been at the forefront of the resistance against Afoko’s popular election to the executive political priesthood of the largely ethnocentric NPP.
The central question is, if Prof. Oquaye thinks or believes he has forensic evidence for all the laundry allegations he is pitching in the media then he may as well take it to a competent jurisdiction for adjudication, just like he so vigorously did in behalf of the NPP against Afoko.
Or better yet, he should keep mute and rather concentrate on his Christian apologetics, negative historical revisionism, and warped conservative political dogma.
After all, he has a respectable bailiwick in these fields and an uninformed, ill-informed following who may be interested in his ideologically conservative illogic, which, among other things includes his underhanded attempts to alchemize strong suspicions into a gold standard of forensic evidence.
Prof. Oquaye may a closet political-intellectual alchemist at that and a profound conspiracy theorist to boot.
Final thoughts
A party that allows another party, a weak and corrupt one of course, to infiltrate or penetrate its executive leadership and rank and file has no business running a corporate body such as Ghana.
A rather more efficient intelligence outfit such as the American CIA or the Israeli Mossad will easily penetrate the NPP (as well as the NDC) with a disappointing crumb of monetary inducement.
Certainly, if there is anything that deserves our mournful sympathy then it is not these scarecrow- or kakamotobi-consuming politicians, or their lying tongues and thieving hands, but rather the dying momentum of the national enterprise—the progressive destiny of the body politic.
And as for Prof. Oquaye and his clueless generation they have slowly but surely destroyed what is left of that hopeful destiny with their teeming calculations of patent lies, fabrications, historical revisionisms, political corruption, loss of technocratic vision, political theology, cronyism and nepotism, meritocratic plundering of the national coffers and natural resources, and sanctimonious greed.
Such men and their hopeless generation cannot be trusted with national security issues. Old-school political junkies and exotic grimoires like Prof. Oquaye have no place in modern politics.
The Ghanaian and African youth needs to avoid their foolish talk, and to rather concentrate on building a brighter future for their generation and generations yet unborn.
Unfortunately on the other hand, one looks at the bloated face of Sam George, the androgynous face of Sammy Awuku, the paedomorphic or avuncular face of Felix Kwakye-Fosu…Kwakye-Fosu’s Totobi Kwakye’s face…and all hope seemed lost, gone…much like the narrative structure and philosophical contours of Margaret Mitchell’s controversial novel “Gone With The Wind”!
As a matter of fact, the sort of redeeming political and economic prophets Ghana needs today can never be found in his ideologically acarpous rhetoric and pontifications. The evidence for this assertion is clear for all to see.
And yet Prof. Oquaye’s darling NPP is awash in political infighting, intolerance, vote-buying, arm-twisting, bribery and money laundering and other forms of corruption, mudslinging and political insults, warmongering rhetoric and rhetorical baboonery, the quackery of political theology, the cult of personality being currently erected around Akufo-Addo, political ethnocentrism, undermining foreign investment efforts in the country, and so on.
Of course, all these negative characterizations are not exclusive to the NPP. They are clear definitions of the post-colonial political culture of Ghana, for the most part in the Fourth Republic.
Even that said, his darling NPP also imports into the country under the cover of darkness, Serbian and South African mercenaries to train political terrorists on the blind side of the entire nation, allegedly.
What is Prof. Oquaye doing about Ghana’s deeply polarized society, rather than his salvoes of ignorant divisive rhetoric which tend to reinforce this societal polarization?
What does he hope to achieve with his blandiloquent idolization of his party’s shadowy cult of personality as well as his less than popular self-imposed captations on this untested, untried cult of personality?
What is he doing about the knuckleheads and bestiocrats and capelocrats in his ethnocentric party and those in the ruling party?
What are his objections to Kennedy Arthur’s “Chasing the Elephant into the Bush” beyond his [Prof. Oquaye’s] political casuistry and intellectual as well as his proverbial methodological mondegreen and canards in his signature postcolonial historical revisionism?
The partisan politics of the likes of Prof. Oquaye, as well as his blind endorsement of Akufo-Addo’s cacoethes for the face of the executive presidency, and so on should be vehemently rejected out of hand.
All forms of political millenarianism, whether they come from Paa Kwesi Nduom, President Mahama, Akua Donkor, or Akufo-Addo, should be rejected out of hand, granted that political millenarianism is a respected province of the worldviews of Al-Qaeda, the Lord’s Resistance Army, Al-Shabab, Boko Haram, ISIS…
Except, of course, black-faced advocates of conservative evangelicalism and political theology like Prof. Oquaye want to impose a blanket political caliphate of sorts, call it ethno-partisan hegemony if you may, on Ghana. This intellectual fraud will not scruple to make up or bend the arms of salient aspects of our postcolonial political history just for the sake of political expediency.
He is too smart for his own good.
We shall return with a concluding installment, Part 3.
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