Truth Be Told About Mr. Rawlings

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

I was quite amused to learn that former President John Agyekum-Kufuor had invited his longtime arch-nemesis and predecessor to join him in celebrating the launching of the John A. Kufuor Center for Leadership, Governance and Development on the campus of the University of Ghana, Legon. Quite amused because throughout his political career as a pseudo-socialist dictator, and even as an elected premier, Mr. Jerry John Rawlings had done much more than both his predecessors and successors to thwart the salutary development of higher education in Ghana. Mainly, he achieved the latter by consistently and perennially shutting down the country’s major institutions of higher learning whenever students and/or faculty protested policies deemed to be inimical to the smooth functioning of tertiary education in Ghana. And while the proverbial cream of our society forcibly sat idly by for months on end, the Rawlingses had their own children shipped abroad for the acquisition of some of the most expensive curricula packages.

To-date, the bloody couple have not credibly explained precisely where they secured such generous financial resources to school their children abroad, while most Ghanaians could barely afford two square meals a day, even as they inexorably lobbed vitriolic tirades against political opponents whom they self-righteously branded as corrupt and visionless.

And here, also, it may be aptly recalled that in the past when his immediate successor had invited him to official functions and other momentous ceremonies, the former Ghana Air Force’s flight-lieutenant had flatly rejected such invitations and instead issued a litany of self-righteous attacks against Mr. Kufuor. And so when he showed up at Legon for the sod-cutting ceremony for the Kufuor Center, I immediately recognized that something indubitably fishy was definitely afoot. I could not, however, readily place my proverbial fingers on exactly what that “fishy something” was until Mr. Kofi Adams, the official spokesman for the Rawlingses, appeared on a radio talk-show and luridly accused Mr. Kufuor and the New Patriotic Party (NPP) of having frustrated the Butcher-of-Sogakope’s purported attempt at establishing an eponymous foundation while the NPP held the reins of governance between 2001 and 2008.

I hope Mr. Rawlings did not so ill-advisedly set Mr. Adams up to such an unforgivably quixotic assay at the impugnation of the credibility of ex-President Kufuor. I say the foregoing because about the only laudable gesture that Mr. Rawlings had made towards the development of Ghana’s intellectual culture was his belated donation of a moiety of his Hunger Prize award as so-called seed money for the establishment of the chronically and woefully underfunded University of Development Studies in the northern-half of the country. And, of course, it needs to be quickly pointed out that while undoubtedly laudable, the establishment of the UDS, which had been on the drawing board since Ghana’s First Republic, may well have been unduly delayed by Mr. Rawlings himself, who spent most of the first decade of his stranglehold on Ghanaian politics stockpiling small munitions, largely supplied by the ousted Libyan strongman, the late Mr. Muammar Gaddhafy, in order to shore up his 19-year reign-of-terror.

Indeed, it was primarily for the foregoing reasons that many of us joined in the, admittedly, rancorous debate over whether like President Nkrumah and the renamed Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Mr. Rawlings, indeed, deserved to be conferred with an honorary doctorate by the academic council of the University of Development Studies. Still, it is significant to observe, at least in passing, that when the balance sheets are objectively drawn, it would clearly be envisaged that when it comes to the promotion of qualitative education in the country, the Kufuor-led New Patriotic Party is absolutely without compare and/or compeer.

Indeed, while the Nkrumah-led Convention People’s Party (CPP) has been plausibly credited with significantly expanding the physical space of Ghanaian education, on the question of adequate teacher training and qualitative preparation, Dr. K. A. Busia would have poignantly pointed out that the CPP’s mass-production approach was scarcely the best way to go at the same for an emergent Third-World country.

Anyway, “Al-Hajj” newspaper editor-publisher Mr. Bature could not be more accurate when the firebrand National Democratic Congress activist pointedly argues that contrary to what the sycophantic Mr. Adams would have his audience and NDC partisans believe, at absolutely no time, whatsoever, did former President Kufuor and/or the New Patriotic Party either frustrate or prevent the rhetorically incontinent Mr. Rawlings from establishing a humanistic foundation along the lines promulgated by Mr. Kufuor.

Personally, while I firmly believe that Mr. Kufuor was genuinely pleased – and even happy – to have Mr. Rawlings respond to his invitation for the sod-cutting ceremony marking the official launching of his eponymous leadership center, I also strongly believe that Mr. Rawlings had no other alternative but to accept that spirit-rousing recognition, having recently been resoundingly rejected by more than 90-percent of the membership of the party which claims Sogakope Jeremiah as its founding patriarch. There is a kind of Freudian justice here in the at once paradoxical and converse rejection of the patriarch. At any rate, it is all too natural for Mr. Kufuor to approach the subject of foundation building, leadership center and a presidential library with style and dignity. He has, of course, witnessed and been fascinated by the same phenomenon among his American counterparts, even as Mr. Rawlings counter-productively chose to hobnob with the nihilistic likes of the Nation of Islam’s Minister Louis Farrakhan and his Chicago team of cynics.

It is also quite edifying to observe the fact that it was Mr. Kofi Annan, the globally recognized first West-African Nobel Peace Prize laureate and former United Nations Secretary-General, who paved the way.

Indeed, Mr. Rawlings may aptly claim to be a revolutionary at heart; but that is really about all that the fast-aging, retired jet-fighter pilot can legitimately claim to be – a revolutionary at heart. Nothing more, or less.

*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 Director of The Sintim-Aboagye Center for Politics and Culture and author of “Dr. J. B. Danquah: Architect of Modern Ghana” (iUniverse.com, 2005). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net. ###