By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
The fact of the matter is that Chairman Jerry John Rawlings created the so-called National Democratic Congress (NDC). And the NDC, today, is unarguably the most corrupt political party and administration in Fourth-Republican Ghana. And so what retired and opposition leaders ought to be enlightening the bloody Mr. Rawlings about is the fact that the Butcher-of-Sogakope is the most corrupt scumbag ever to dominate postcolonial Ghanaian politics, and stop being pusillanimously tentative by peevishly whining about Mr. Rawlings' not being an angel.
Of course, everybody knows that Togbui Avaklasu I is Satan incarnate. And so what is new here? Indeed, if I were Mr. Kofi Adams - God forbid! - the notoriously garrulous and sneakily fork-tongued Rawlings lickspittle, I wouldn't be talking about Mr. Kufuor's having heaped extravagantly extraneous encomiums on himself (See "Rawlings Won't Give Himself a Medal Like Kufuor - Kofi Adams" MyJoyOnline.com / Ghanaweb.com 1/10/14). Rawlings did far worse than that. Virtually every one of his dozens of mansions dotted across the country has its walls decorated with the skulls of some of the tens of thousands of law-abiding Ghanaian citizens he executed in the name of his rabidly anti-Akan revolution.
And Mr. Adams full-well knows about this fact; and so why this nauseating early morning grandstanding about Rawlings' supposedly enviable moral capital on Ghanaian political culture? It was, to be certain, the gross administrative incompetence of Mr. Rawlings, during the two decades that he megalomaniacally hogged the helm of our national politics, that pathetically inflated Mr. Kufuor with an oversized sense of relative administrative overachievement.
At any rate, contrary to what his New Patriotic Party (NPP) respondents would have their supporters and sympathizers believe, Mr. Rawlings is neither being "mischievous" nor "provocative" in his characteristically intemperate cavilling of Mr. Kufuor; he is simply doing what he does best, which is to strategically distract glaring public attention from the Stygian mess in which he and his lackeys have plunged the country.
If, indeed, as Mr. Rawlings shamelessly claims, former President John Agyekum-Kufuor was an "autocratic thief," who then was Rawlings? A democratic Santa Claus who generously divested Ghana of its seminal indutrial base, by recklessly and cynically quartering up GIHOC among his family members, relatives and cronies in the name of "probity, accountability and justice"? Of course, he was that too and much, much more!
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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
Jan. 10, 2014
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
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