Zita Okaikoi Is Nobody's Fool!

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

The actual title of this piece ought to have been as follows: “Ghana Is Still A Colonial Outpost For Afropeans.” This is because it deals with an issue that is systemic and more far-reaching than the attitude or (mis-)behavior of any highly positioned state/government official may seem to suggest. And it is the slavo-colonial question of self-esteem. The simple fact which, were it to be humbly and honestly admitted, could propel Ghanaians and our country very far indeed, regards the catatonic temperament of nearly all of our leaders since the dawn of our political sovereignty in 1951.


In other words, our single greatest problem as a nation is that Ghanaians have been apocalyptically unfortunate to have had people almost totally devoid of self- and cultural pride rule us since 1957.


Starting with President Kwame Nkrumah and his trophy Egyptian wife, Fathia, Ghanaians have not been well-respected by their own leaders who, it turns out, have been morbidly afflicted with a morally and spiritually blistering disease called “Diffidence.” A lack of self-confidence, to be concise and exact. In the case of Nkrumah, such diffidence would be deftly camouflaged by a protean ideology called “Pan-Africanism,” which Ghanaians, in particular, and Africans, in general, have yet to heartily embrace beyond the infantile and theatrical realm of dazzling political rhetoric. And to this day, forty-four salutary years after his ouster, we have yet to witness what concrete benefits, beyond the primal satiation of his apparent coital incontinence and ego, that Nkrumah’s conjugal relationship with Fathia has engendered which could not have been achieved if the first popularly elected premier of postcolonial Ghana had self-respectfully decided to marry and showcase an indigenous Ghanaian as the pride of sovereign Ghana’s femininity.


Instead, barely a year after Ghana led “Black-Africa” into the glorious state of sovereignty, Nkrumah would import for himself the white elephant of a trophy wife, about half his age, who would herself involuntarily become an anachronistic burden, both psychologically and materially, on the young and fragile state. For not only did Mrs. Nkrumah linguistically and culturally find herself to be out of place, it appears, by the most candid accounts, Ghanaians, on the other hand, never quite learned how to organically relate to this Arabo-Francophone Egyptian maiden.

Still, perhaps, in tribute to their premier who had, supposedly, heroically relieved them of the leaden burden of the Great Imperialist Leviathan that was England, the people would plant the admittedly dainty Egyptian relic on a pedestal with a textile text titled “Fathia is most deserving of Nkrumah.” Since then, Ghanaians, it tragically seems, have become mortally afflicted with this schizophrenic disease which, on the one hand counsels pride in their culture and nationhood, even while convincingly insisting to them that whatever institution or product that has the imprimatur of “Ghana/Ghanaian” stamped on it may likely not be exactly what the proverbial doctor ordered.


And so on the crisply summery, Saturday morning of June 5, 2010 when Ghanaweb.com woke us with a rather sensationalized piece of gossip parading as headline news captioned “Zita Flies To USA For Baby,” many of us could not stop laughing and sneering till we effectively ran out of tears. To be certain, the original source of the publication, for many of us, was what was more intriguing than anything else; and that source was the Daily Guide, an ideologically opposition-leaning tabloid.


Not that there is anything amiss with a typical opposition rag doing what it traditionally does best – which is to unreservedly and inexorably expose what it perceives to be the outrageous doings of government officials and their cronies – but the rather sanctimonious suggestion that, somehow, Ghana’s substantive Tourism Minister ought to become an exception to the rule.


Anyway, in the aforementioned publication, readers are apprised of the fact that: “Ghana’s Tourism Minister, Zita Sabah Okaikoi, is residing with her maid-servant and bodyguard in a government of Ghana facility while on a private visit to New York to seek maternal care, information reaching Daily Guide from the United States indicates.” On a lighthearted note, I must confess that the mention of the minister’s bodyguard almost immediately brought to mind the still-raging South African scandal in which the second wife of President Jacob Zumah is reported to be either pregnant with or have delivered the “love-child” of her bodyguard into sharply comical focus.


But, of course, we must hasten to point out that such imaginative leap is laden with absolutely no literal or even figurative pun on the chastity of Sister Zita. What we are not so obliquely attempting to suggest to the editors and publishers of the Daily Guide is that vehemently and eloquently voting one’s total lack of confidence in Ghana’s public health system, even as the Daily Guide’s own reporter suggests in the article, by seeking such services abroad, is no outlandish quirk or caprice of Ms. Okaikoi’s. To be certain, in deciding to deliver her third baby here in the United States rather than in any of our fourth-class hospitals at home, what the Tourism Minister is simply saying is that her life is worth no less than that of any other Ghanaian leader since the dawn of our First Republic.

And to be certain, one wonders why it took Sister Zita so long to make such crucial life-and-death decision. In other words, why had the minister also not had her first two children abroad, preferably here in the United States, where they too would have been blessed with “automatic citizenship”? Of course, we do know why! After all, hadn’t my own dear Uncle Kofi Diawuo driven the Tourist Elephant into the Osu Castle during the previous eight years?


Anyway, if Uncle Fiifi Atta-Chimp can routinely fly to South Africa – in the name of Pan-Africanism – for medical checkups, what ought to prevent Sister Zita from upping the latter with an even more heady junket into “The land of the free and home of the brave”? And in the case of our Sister Zita, wouldn’t it have been sheer foolhardiness to have casually subjected herself to routine professional negligence at any one of our nineteenth-centuryesque labor wards? And the latter, coming barely a month, or so, after the heart-wrenching “Inusah Affair.”


And for those of our readers who may not readily recall the latter, it regards the death of the wife of Ghana’s Deputy Energy Minister who recently died while on admission at the flagship Police Hospital, in Accra, where Mrs. Inusah had gone to deliver a baby. Even as I write (6/6/10), high-powered investigations are under way to determine if, indeed, Mrs. Inusah had died of abject professional neglect, as is being alleged by the family of the deceased woman. Already, there are those phalanges of NDC apparatchiks who since she was initially confirmed as Information Minister have never ceased to impugn the critical faculties and judgment of Sister Zita. Quite a slew of her critics have continued to demand her dismissal from the Mills-Mahama cabinet ever since.


Then, of course, it also needs to be pointed out that this neocolonialist tradition of routinely seeking medical treatment abroad is not peculiar to any particular political party or ideological suasion. During the Busia-led Second Republic, for instance, the finest and easily the most scholarly Ghanaian premier was often accused of spending too much of his working time abroad on medical treatment. Ex-President Jeremiah John “Probity and Accountability” Rawlings has also been known to seek medical treatment abroad, largely here in the United States, where he is also widely known to keep company with Black separatist ideologue and Nation of Islam pontiff Minister Louis Farrakhan.


The interesting ironic twist here is that Mr. Rawlings began his political career as an anti-American crusader – which is why it is also rather ironic to learn that that the longtime Ghanaian strongman has partly educated almost all his children in the United States, where he is a fairly familiar face in New York City’s African-American community.

Then, of course, there is also the tragic case of Mr. Kwadwo Baah Wiredu, Finance Minister under the Kufuor-led New Patriotic Party (NPP) government, who died while seeking medical treatment in South Africa.


We have said time and again that as long as Ghanaian voters continue to tolerate ministers of state, and other highly positioned government officials, who behave as if they are on a reluctant tour of some colonial outpost, our national development agenda would continue to stall. In sum, if Ghanaians want to witness a remarkable improvement in the quality of healthcare in our country, then, come Election 2012, we have to ensure that a proposition barring all actively serving members of government from seeking medical treatment abroad is put on the ballot.


For that matter, a binding resolution barring prominent executive officials from schooling their children and relatives abroad, while actively engaged in the service of the people, could also be passed in the Ghanaian parliament.


At any rate, whether Ms. Zita Okaikoi ought to have stayed with friends and relatives while the heavily pregnant minister spends her three-month vacation in the United States, where she is also reportedly soliciting maternity care, is a rather dicey one. Let’s assume hypothetically that while vacationing in the United States Ms. Okaikoi were to be met with a life-threatening accident, while privately and unofficially lodging with either friends or relatives. What would likely be the predictable knee-jerk reaction of her most ardent critics but the following: “We told you Zita was a dumbo. After all, what prevented her from seeking help from either the Ghana Embassy in Washington, DC, or the New York City-located Ghana Mission to the United Nations?”


You see, her most ardent critics may aptly envisage themselves to be smarter than Zita Sabah Okaikoi; but in this case, it is only a clinical idiot who would impugn the genius of Ghana’s Tourism Minister.

*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 “Sororoscopes: Revised and Expanded” (iUniverse.com, 2004). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net.


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