By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
I read with incontinent amusement the article captioned “Arthur K’s Call for Apologies: A Dissection of the Untruths and Political Equalization” JoyOnline.com 5/7/12) and could, naturally, not help but wonder whether its author still believed that Ghanaians were still punch-drunk and under the Rawlings-led Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) reign-of-terror.
What really amused me was Mr. Kofi Adoli’s rather brazen attempt to indemnify the now-President John Evans Atta-Mills from his 2008 promise to rain “hell” and “Kenya” on Ghana, should the general election not go the way of the now-ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC).
The problem that hugely confronts Mr. Adoli has, of course, to do with the writer’s imperative need to explain to his audience why, if, indeed, the then-Candidate Mills had in no way, whatsoever, threatened to plunge the country into a Kenya-type of apocalypse, the then-British High Commissioner to Ghana had immediately summoned Professor Mills, accompanied by Professor Kofi Awoonor, to his official Greenhill residence in order for Candidate Mills to explain precisely what he meant.
Or does Mr. Adoli suppose that the temporal duration of a mere three-and-half years is too long for Ghanaians to remember? Or simply that the British High Commissioner had grossly misunderstood the heavily Ghanaian-accented threat of the NDC’s so-called Prince-of-Peace (or Asomdwoehene)?
It is also rather presumptuous for Mr. Adoli who, ironically, lives in London to be defining rhetorical timelines vis-à-vis the brutal mauling of Ms. Ursula Owusu and the outright declaration of war on Ghanaian citizens of Akan descent by Nii Lante Vanderpuije, the fire-spitting NDC parliamentary candidate for the Odododiodio Constituency in Election 2012 to key political players on the ground like Dr. Arthur Kobina Kennedy.
To be certain, as reliably reported by Mr. Jake Obetsebi-Lamptey, the National Chairman of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), this is exactly what Mr. Vanderpuije said immediately prior to the brutal assault of Ms. Owusu, allegedly by NDC-hired hoodlums: “I swear to you that the NPP can never organize any rally in Odododiodio [Constituency] in the near future, if that is their mission. The only place that will be safe for them [to hold their rallies] will be [outer] space, and not in my constituency” (See Obetsebi-Lamptey “Mills is Creating a Dangerous Environment in Ghana” 4/19/12).
Of course, Mr. Adoli clearly and rightly anticipated a flash response to his rather reprehensible attempt to falsify the reality of recent upheavals on the Ghanaian political landscape, thus his predictably disingenuous attempt to fault computer (or cyber) technology for “dangerously” contributing to the temporization (or the sacrificing) of truth in the service of the lightning speed with which cyber-aided communication is disseminated these days.
It is also rather unfortunate, albeit all-too-predictable, that Mr. Adoli, ironically, would put the proverbial cart before the horse by falsely attempting to claim that, indeed, Mr. Kennedy Ohene Agyepong, the NPP-MP from Assin-North, had issued his patently anti-Ewe tirade without provocation; and also that the presidential candidate of the main opposition New Patriotic Party, Nana Akufo-Addo, had issued his cautionary “All-Die-Be-Die” mantra out of a total political vacuum.
The fact of the matter is that the Rawlings-founded Provisional National Democratic Congress (P/NDC) has a unique history of fomenting violence and systematically orchestrating the brutal assault and outright assassination of its political opponents that none of the other political parties can boast of. ###
