By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
I have tackled this insufferably annoying question of political self-preening time and time again, and sincerely wish that the shameless traders of such nuisance sideshows could move their distasteful game somewhere else, in order to allow economically depressed Ghanaians to devise constructive means of moving the country forward (See “NDC: J. A. Kufuor Envies J. J. Rawlings” Ghanaweb.com 11/11/11).
That nuisance question, of course, regards who is the greatest postcolonial Ghanaian leader. The key operatives of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) recently accused former President John Agyekum-Kufuor of pursuing a politics of personal envy, because the man who made it possible for Ghanaians to, once again, be able to carry the country’s monetary currency, the Cedi, in wallets and purses, rather than brief cases and cocoa sacks, had dared to carp his immediate predecessor, former President Jerry John Rawlings, for a perennially obstreperous streak of vainglorious boastfulness by rather obscenely claiming to be the best postcolonial ruler that Ghana ever had.
According to the ever-exuberant Propaganda Secretary of the National Democratic Congress, Mr. Richard Quashigah, “If there is any former leader[,] apart from [Mr. Kwame] Nkrumah, worth applauding, then it must be Jerry Rawlings.” The problem that Mr. Quashigah clearly has in attempting to carry forth his argument is that Mr. Jeremiah John Rawlings is categorical about his superlative self-glorification. In other words, in the pathologically conceited opinion of Sogakope Jeremiah, the man who has also been described as Ghana’s political Enfant Terrible, any attempt to even compare the former Ghana Air Force flight-lieutenant to the pioneering African Show Boy would unpardonably detract from the sui generis caliber of the man who viciously hijacked the development of Ghanaian democracy for nearly twenty years.
Another problem with such self-preening rivalry is that it achieves just about anything, except put three square meals on the dining tables of hardworking Ghanaian families every day. What is also rather insulting, to speak much less about the utterly despicable, is the NDC propaganda secretary’s claim that Mr. Rawlings “deserves commendation for being ‘one of the few African leaders to resuscitate a collapsed economy’ in the early [sic] 1983.” Somehow, Mr. Quashigah either conveniently forgets or was too young to remember that, indeed, part of the massive collapse of the Ghanaian economy was naively and recklessly engineered by the three months of forcible market price freezing undertaken by the Rawlings-led so-called Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC). Thus by September 1979, when he handed over the reins of governance to the democratically elected Dr. Hilla Limann and his Nkrumah-leaning People’s National Party (PNP), the AFRC Abongo Boys had used the facile politics of populism to literally grind Ghana’s admittedly and hitherto fragile and ailing economy to a screeching halt.
In other words, on the eve of his handover of Mr. Antubam’s Chair to the liberal market-oriented Dr. Limann, there virtually was no viable economy in Ghana to talk about. What is also significant to note, for the benefit of those Ghanaians who were too young to remember, is the fact that the IMF-World bank-minted Structural Adjustment Program (SAP), for which Mr. Rawlings made quite a great name for himself, was actually and ironically a Limann Economic Recovery Program (LERP) whose operational intent had been disingenuously used by the Rawlings posse to both revile and demonize the PNP and all civilian governments in postcolonial Ghanaian history. To be certain, it was in practical reference to the SAP economic package that Dr. Limann made his famous and much-quoted mantra of “Let the market prices find their own tides.” For nearly two years, between December 31, 1981 and mid-1983, just before the tough-talking pseudo-Marxist Mr. Rawlings caved in to the IMF-World Bank demand for a radical transformation of the clinically vegetable Ghanaian economy, Mr. Rawlings self-righteously help up Dr. Limann as a classical example of the kind of leadership Africans could absolutely do without.
If, indeed, this is what Mr. Quashigah and the rest of the NDC pack of hoodlums and intransigent cynics would have chalked up as one of the sterling achievements of the Rawlings government, then Ghanaians are really in deep trouble. Anyway, as I have had occasion to observe time and again, no objective Ghanaian intellectual, scholar and/or critic can compare the six highly productive years of the Acheampong junta with the 19 years of P/NDC stranglehold on Ghanaian politics and draw the balance sheet in favor of the Butcher-of-Sogakope, rather than the slain leader of the National Redemption Council (NRC) and the so-called Supreme Military Council (SMC I) – (1972-1978).
Indeed, if as the NDC propaganda secretary would have Ghanaians believe, any single leader deserves to be credited with having brought the best out of his countrymen and women, then it goes without saying that that leader was none other than Gen. I. K. Acheampong and, of course, Col. Frank Bernasko of Operation Feed Yourself (OFY) fame. Couple the preceding with the carcinogenic, or cancerous, “culture of silence” systematically induced by the Rawlings-led P/NDC, and the claim by the NDC propaganda secretary that the Rawlings regime brought out the best in Ghanaian citizens demonstrably begins to manifest itself for the gaping farce that it veritably is. Then again, isn’t it only P/NDC operatives like Mr. Quashigah who can equate the ethnic-cleansing of high court judges with a salutary infusion of credibility and sanity into the country’s judicial system?
*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. ###
