Rev. Asante-Antwi Should Not Apologize ....

for NDC Corruption And Terror Reign!

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

When his clerical portrait appeared under a banner headline endorsing the newly-reelected presidential candidate of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), while simultaneously condemning untold atrocities and the virtual reign-of-terror visited on Ghanaians by the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC), I sighed with relief, proudly beamed and uttered: “Well, finally, a bold and courageous man has spoken out, the way a man of God ought to!”

Of course, I am talking about former Ghanaian Methodist Prelate Samuel Asante-Antwi, who recently warmly and wholeheartedly endorsed the 2012 presidential candidacy of Nana Addo-Dankwa Akufo-Addo. In the wake of his ringing endorsement of the latter, the Very Reverend Asante-Antwi (I hope I got his honorific right) has come under a critical blitz from both Ghana’s Center for Democratic Development (CDD) and the Christian Council of Ghana (CCG). Predictably, the at once obnoxious, rambunctious and stentorian NDC Information Minister, Mr. Samuel Okudzeto-Ablakwa, also weighed in on the side of his party and government.

It is not, however, clear what Mr. Okudzeto-Ablakwa means by alluding to the very auspiciously historical context of Rev. Asante-Antwi’s endorsement of Nana Akufo-Addo as “unfortunate.” Or it just could be that Mr. Okudzeto-Ablakwa was ill-advisedly afforded an English language course exemption while in both grade school and college. To be certain, what is rather unfortunate is to have grossly mis-educated NDC-sponsored youths running riot and rampant like veritable thugs around the country and brutally assaulting both innocent civilians and public officials with gusto, as well as seizing public places of convenience with the full and hearty endorsement of Messrs. John Evans Atta-Mills and Samuel Okudzeto-Ablakwa!

What with arbitrary and rampant and summary expropriation of vehicles and other valuable and legitimately-owned property from members, supporters and sympathizers of the opposition New Patriotic Party? Of course, I more than fully appreciate the legal implications provoked by a venerable religious leader making what might aptly be deemed as loaded partisan political statements. Still, what is even far more significant to observe is the fact that the NDC appears to have inaugurated a benighted regime of wanton violence, rank corruption and abject lawlessness in our otherwise staid and placid beloved country. And during all this while, what Americans are wont to calling “an open season,” the government continues to brazenly and self-righteously insist, contrary to sound moral reasoning and common sense, that, in fact, Ghanaians are enjoying an unprecedented bonanza of economic deflation, almost as if the latter state of affairs were synonymous with an economic bonanza itself!

Then also, we have the General-Secretary of the Christian Council of Ghana, Rev. Fred Deegbe, claiming rather lamely that Rev. Asante-Antwi’s unreserved endorsement of Nana Akufo-Addo “went too far.” What is interesting here is to recall the fact that even Mr. Jeremiah John Rawlings, unarguably the most violent and extortionate political figure in Ghana’s recent history, is on record as having mordantly castigated the Atta-Mills government, on innumerable occasions, for smugly presiding over a regime of gross indiscipline.

Needless to say, the foregoing is rather ironic, being that Mr. Rawlings is also both the founder and intransigent mentor, selector and imposer/enforcer of Dr. Atta-Mills on both the NDC and Ghana at large. Indeed, what the public ought to be loudly wondering about is why it took so unbearably long for a respectable religious leader of Rev. Asante-Antwi’s stature to point Ghanaians to a potentially better political alternative. You see, one can only expect ideological passivity and/or outright neutrality in a national political climate of optimums – in other words, in a situation where the government and party in power are envisaged to be evenhanded, responsive as well as responsible.

In reality, what his professional colleagues ought to be doing, were Ghana really a society of genuinely concerned and morally responsible religious leaders, would be to go beyond Rev. Deegbe’s rather tentative, wistful and equivocal reaction to the effect that, indeed, while Rev. Asante-Antwi had raised some issues of “pertinence and grave concern to the Christian Council,” nonetheless, the platform on which the former head of the Ghana Methodist Church chose to do so was, somehow, “grossly inappropriate.” And here must be promptly riposted the fact that, in fact, Rev. Asante-Antwi spoke in his legitimate political capacity as Chairman of the NPP Council of Elders, and not as a Christian religious leader!

Maybe Rev. Deegbe must be pointed to the landmark Biblical drama of Jesus summarily and convulsively expelling the greedy money changers who cavalierly presumed to blight the Temple in Jerusalem.

Likewise, it is rather flagrantly regressive for the legal officer of Ghana’s Center for Democratic Development, Mr. Kojo Asante, to presume to condescendingly urge Rev. Asante-Antwi to apologize for what the former misguidedly claims to be the “needless political comments of a man of God.” I suppose what the CDD legal officer is attempting to enforce here is the sort of teeth-grinding hypocrisy and abject cowardice that have characterized the Ghanaian Christian Church amidst the wanton atrocities of a godless, pseudo-socialist political juggernaut inspired by Mr. Rawlings and piloted by President Atta-Mills.

Beyond the superficial politics of theatrical context, what Rev. Asante-Antwi achieved with his overt endorsement of Candidate Akufo-Addo, was to launch a psychologically liberating revolution among a harried and perennially frustrated Ghanaian electorate, by offering the latter a bold and conscientious leadership alternative come 2012. And it is for this reason that the former prelate of the Ghana Methodist Church ought to be applauded, instead of being made to feel like a judicial assassin.

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is a Governing Board Member of the Accra-based Danquah Institute (DI) and the author of 21 books, including “Ghanaian Politics Today” (Atumpan Publications/Lulu.com, 2008). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net.

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