Rawlings Was Right On Mahama

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

Garden City, New York

Nov.7, 2014

E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

I sincerely don't care a whit about Chairman Jerry John Rawlings. Not by any measure or stretch of the imagination. But on the occasions that the man is right, he is often dead-on-target. Six years on, and a humongous mountain of Stygian mess trailed by the Mills-Mahama government, and now the Mahama/Amissah-Arthur regime, who can blame the founding-father of the so-called National Democratic Congress (NDC) for sticking out his chest and proudly sneering: "I told you so!"?

It really is no stroke of genius for the man who cherry-picked and groomed nearly each and every key operative of the NDC to claim to know these political rascals like the very palms of his hands. After all, isn't Chairman Rawlings the Dean of All Political Rascals in Fourth-Republican Ghana? You may, like me, hate the guts of the man; but when it comes to assessing the heft and breadth of his own brood, Chairman Rawlings has no peer. He is also the reason why the National Democratic Congress has been clearly recognized to be imbued with relatively more discipline than its closest and most formidable rival, the New Patrotic Party (NPP).

Now, though, his hitherto uncontestable dictatorial political strategy is fast receding into history. It may well become his most significant legacy to both party and country. But whether it is legacy worth recalling with pride, rather than insufferable embarrassment, remains to be seen.

Well, what inspired this write-up was the decision by Dr. Josiah Aryeh and the executive members of the NDC-breakaway group, the Konadu-Rawlings-led National Democratic Party (NDP), to pay a courtesy, and evidently a supportive, call on the 2016 presidential candidate of the New Patriotic Party, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo. It weall appears that the editors and publishers of the Informer newspaper are having nightmares, as well as sleepless nights, over the same. It also does not mean anything for the Informer's editors and publishers to call the country's main opposition leader Mr. Williams [sic] Addo-Dankwa Akufo-Addo, instead of the preferred and widely acknowledged Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo. It will not add an ounce of creativity to the bumbling and pathologically corrupt Mahama/Amissah-Arthur regime.

And what if Nana Akufo-Addo is a "twice-defeated Presidential Candidate of the opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP)"? What does that make the late President John Evans Atta-Mills? A twice-defeated and auspiciously and opportunely assassinated National Democratic Congress' political pawn and scapegoat?

You see, what makes the rabid bitching of the Informer's editors and publishers rather pathetic is the fact that the Konadu-Rawlings-led National Democratic Party has from its inception made it incontrovertibly known that short of an about-turn decision by Messrs. Kwabena Adjei and Johnson Asiedu-Nketia to peremptorily coronate Ghana's longest-reigning first lady as the NDC's presidential candidate, any attempt to cannibalize the NDP into a "natural" coalition with the NDC would be tantamount to the wishful thinking of a clinical idiot. This simple fact is what the Informer's editors and publishers appear to be having such a hard time coming to terms with.

Still, I also find it absolutely necessary to counsel Nana Akufo-Addo to gravely look the NDP gift horse in the mouth before presuming to make any far-reaching decision on what to make of the same. Those of us who vividly remember the Efua Sutherland Park fiasco of 2012 are not very warm to the idea of an inadvisable response to the same. Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings has long since had her time and period in the sun and must be recognized as such.

It is now a new day, and the turn of those who fervidly hope to bring Ghana up to par with progressive developments of the globalized community that is the twenty-first century.

A word to the wise....

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