Seditious Rawlings

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

You would have thought that having hogged Ghana’s reins of governance for some twenty marathon years, Mr. Rawlings would, by now, have learned that embassies are established in countries to enable leaders of such great powers as the United States, Russia, Britain, France and Japan, for obvious examples, to be educative about the goings-on in other countries.

Interestingly, according to Mr. Victor E. Smith, special aide to former President Jeremiah John Rawlings, the foregoing is quite contrary to established convention. Which is why last Saturday, February 23, 2008, the Ghanaian Chronicle reported the Rawlings lickspittle to be claiming that, somehow, the Butcher-of-Dzelukope had accepted President Kufuor’s invitation to join the latter at a state dinner that the substantive Ghanaian premier was hosting for President George W. Bush, because Chief-Butcher-Dzelukope wanted to gain the ears of the American leader in order to personally relate to George “Dubya” the withering extent of corruption and injustice being perpetrated against the innocent people of Ghana by the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP).

If, indeed, the foregoing has any iota of veracity then, of course, Mr. Rawlings would have done far better by staying home and enjoying his Agbelima and Fitri Dekyi. But I bet my proverbial bottom-dollar that it was precisely because Mr. Rawlings and his Missus have been eating Agbelima dinners in total isolation for sometime now, and that was why the bloody couple decided to up and enjoy something very different when the American president visited Ghana and actually stayed in the country for three nights!

After all, when was the last time that an American president paid an official visit to Ghana and actually stayed for three nights? We vividly recall former President William Jefferson Clinton’s 1998 official visit to Ghana; back then, the Arkansas Democrat spent a piddling 12 hours in Accra amidst an embarrassing pomp and circumstance. But what is even more momentous is the fact that Mr. Clinton neither promised nor even delivered half the aide package that his successor both promised and delivered to the country.

The preceding notwithstanding, if, indeed, Mr. Rawlings’ sole objective for accepting President Kufuor’s dinner invitation was to personally and expressly undermine the nonesuch socioeconomic and political record of the ruling New Patriotic Party, and thus seditiously discredit the government and people of Ghana, then Mr. Rawlings must be promptly prosecuted.

Looking back at the picture depicting Mr. Rawlings and his wife slavishly cringing before Mr. Bush, though, I wouldn’t in the least be surprised if the founding-proprietor of the NDC was actually begging President Bush to be granted a diplomatic visa so that the one-time inveterate enemies of the United States could, once again, travel to the nation that George Washington founded and Martin Luther King, Jr., liberated and made great.

Indeed, what the servile likes of Mr. Victor Smith might be too embarrassed to publicly acknowledge is that having effectively rendered himself a pariah and a thoroughgoing outcast, Mr. Rawlings merely, albeit ineffectually, attempted to rehabilitate himself and his deeply tarnished image as a clinical troglodyte, by accepting Mr. Kufuor’s dinner invitation. Still, it was predictably the dumbest thing for Mr. Rawlings to do, having childishly refused to attend and participate in festivities marking the Golden Jubilee Anniversary of Ghana’s re-attainment of sovereignty from Britain.

Interestingly this past January, during Ghana’s hosting of the African Cup of Nations (CAN 2008), Chief Dzelukope repeated his lunatic antics by choosing to sit in the bleachers – or popular stand – by turning down an official presidential invitation to share the VIP box with Mr. Kufuor. Curiously, however, the Butcher’s second-banana, Prof. John Evans Atta-Mills, snapped up the President’s invitation to share the VIP box with him.

Indeed, during the course of CAN 2008, President Kufuor had been forced to leave the country in order to confer with experts of the World Food Program (WFP) in Rome, Italy, against baseless accusations of having abandoned the Black Stars, the senior Ghanaian national team. It would also be quite interesting to learn of precisely what caused ex-Vice President Atta-Mills to pull up stakes and unceremoniously decamp to South Africa. I hear the chief-architect of P/NDC reign-of-terror is hiding out somewhere in the vicinity of either Cape Town or Johannesburg.

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English and Journalism at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is the author of “When Dancers Play Historians and Thinkers,” a forthcoming essay collection on postcolonial Ghanaian politics. E-mail: okoampaahoofe@aol.com.

Views expressed by the author(s) do not necessarily reflect those of GhanaHomePage.