Too Late, Mr. Rawlings!

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

The very notion that former President Jerry John Rawlings endorsed the now-Caretaker President John Dramani Mahama in 2004 as the running-mate of the now-late President John Evans Atta-Mills, but that such endorsement was, somehow, roundly rejected by the then-Candidate Mills, does not hold water (See “Dec. 7 Elections: Rawlings Endorses President Mahama” MyJoyOnline.com 12/2/12).

It does not hold water because in the lead-up to Election 2008, Mrs. Rawlings invaded several radio stations in Accra, Ghana’s capital, and angrily and vehemently asserted that her husband, former President Rawlings, had not approved of the selection of his former Communication Minister as the running-mate of Candidate Mills. Back then, also, Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings made it emphatically known that “John Mahama cannot be trusted.” And, needless to say, the theme of Mr. Mahama’s untrustworthiness has been the anthem of the Rawlingses for the past four years.

And so it would be quite interesting for Mr. Rawlings, who had for nearly four years insisted that the Mills-Mahama government was thoroughly composed of and riddled with “Greedy Bastards,” who were both unconscionably and indiscriminately stealing and wasting the hard-earned monetary and capital resources of the country, to explain the meaning of his alleged endorsement of the former Atta-Mills arch-lieutenant.

But that it was his own so-called Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) “revolutionary” regime that created these “greedy bastards” and positioned them in prominent and sensitive administrative seats in government, is an issue that Mr. Rawlings has yet to honestly and responsibly address. In other words, what we are herein observing is the fact that the former president does himself and his integrity and credibility – or whatever might be left of the same, that is – great ill by pretending, all of a sudden, that remarkably anything has changed vis-à-vis the corrupt habits and/or modus operandi of the thugs, thieves and pathological scam-artists that he callously imposed on the nation.

In recent months, Mr. Rawlings has also not spared the least opportunity to make it known to Ghanaian voters that President Mahama is a veritable political accident and an administrative misfit woefully devoid of any creative imagination and/or vision to both reform the rag-tag regime of the so-called National Democratic Congress and the nation at large.

Mr. Rawlings has also not hesitated to meet with Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, the presidential candidate of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) in order to solicit the latter’s assurance of the “protection” of the key operatives of the public-latrine commandeering National Democratic Congress, in the incontrovertible likelihood of Nana Akufo-Addo’s being declared the decisive winner of Election 2012.

In other words, about the only way to make sense of Mr. Rawlings’ alleged endorsement of President Mahama is that, somehow, the former president has become convinced that his pathological scofflaw of an Electoral Commissioner, Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan, has already put the predictable in place to favor his former minion. Short of the preceding, Mr. Rawlings’ alleged endorsement of President Mahama ought to be seen for what it clearly is: a decent farewell address to the key operatives of the so-called National Democratic Congress by their former Chief-Patron, in much the same way that the Pope used to bless the slave ships before the latter set sail from Rome and other parts of the Iberian Peninsula to engage in the brutal and ungodly business of the massive capture and enslavement of African humanity.

Ghanaian voters must also roundly reject the Cash-and-Carry and pay-hike addicted “greedy bastard” government of the so-called National Democratic Congress by wholeheartedly welcoming the Akufo-Addo-led New Patriotic Party, if only to considerably improve the Kufuor-fashioned National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) and make Kindergarten, Elementary and Secondary education affordable to all Ghanaians regardless of geographical location, ethnicity or economic status.

Indeed, the dawn of true democracy has, once again, arrived in much the same way that it did on January 1, 2001; and the imperative need for Ghanaian voters to choose progress and enlightenment over regression and cynicism cannot be gainsaid.

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D. Department of English Nassau Community College of SUNY Garden City, New York December 2, 2012 ###