Rawlings merely exposed himself

I could catalogue a book-length series of the ways in which former President Jerry John Rawlings has demeaned and desecrated the legacy of Ghana’s first post-colonial leader, but due to temporal strictures I intend to focus on only a handful of them (See “Rawlings Blasts Kufuor; Mills, Mahama Not Spared” Today.com / Ghanaweb.com 12/13/17).

For starters, it scandalizes our sense of decency as bona fide Ghanaian citizens to hear Chairman Rawlings deliriously tear into former President John Agyekum-Kufuor, his immediate successor, for supposedly desecrating the name, image and reputation of President Kwame Nkrumah. After all, what could be more demeaning of Nkrumah’s legacy and memory than the politically and economically regressive decision by the Rawlings-led regime of the so-called Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) to literally quarter up the Nkrumah-created seminal industrial base of the country, otherwise known as the Ghana Industrial Holdings Corporation (GIHOC), among his family members and cronies?

But what I actually wanted to highlight here is the morally and diplomatically demeaning and shameful speech that Chairman Rawlings gave at the gravesite inauguration of the Kwame Nkrumah Mausoleum, in Accra, in the presence of Dr. Betty Shabazz, the widow of the legendary African-American human and civil rights leader and activist, Malcolm X, and other equally prominent and globally renowned African-American leaders and scholars who had put in their impressive and dignified presence to grace the occasion. I am quite certain that a videotape of that national contretemps exists somewhere in an archive in Ghana or even somewhere on Google. This is what President Kufuor ought to have located and played for all Ghanaians and the global community to see and hear, rather than pointlessly going down to the knee-low level of this veritable postcolonial Ghanaian albatross who clearly appears to be totally bereft of any dignified sense of our national history.

And for the benefit of those who may not remember, or were too young to remember, Mr. Rawlings had the temerity to stand in the foregrounds of the Nkrumah Mausoleum and call the man being honored a cantankerous dictator who had no use for democracy and value for the lives of his political and ideological opponents. Now, let’s talk about the proverbial man in the mirror.

Make no mistake, my dear reader, I have my own grievances against Mr. Kufuor, but such grievances far pale in significance to those that I have against this abjectly poor excuse of a revolutionary leader, whose wife once colluded with a former African-American president of the college where I have been teaching for some two decades to have been fired.

It is also indisputable that Mr. Rawlings’ Cash-and-Carry faux-socialist economic and political philosophy makes the man the diametrical opposite of President Nkrumah. And so, really, what cheap political point is the former Ghana Airforce’s flight-lieutenant trying to score here?

And isn’t Chairman Rawlings also known to have rudely evicted Mrs. Fathia Ritz-Nkrumah from the house presented to her and her children by Gen. Ignatius Kutu Acheampong and have the same house occupied by the late Justice Annan, his fellow dyed-in-the-wool Trokosi Nationalist? Isn’t it also ironic that Chairman Rawlings and his so-called Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) Abongo Boys would have Gen. Acheampong virulently stripped of all his military titles and honors and summarily executed by firing squad for corruption?

And then, also, what is all this nonsense about Mr. Kufuor’s having desecrated President Nkrumah’s tomb by having Mrs. Nkrumah buried beside her lawfully wedded husband? I mean, is SogakopeJato sane or healthy upstairs?

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