By Dr. Samuel Adjei Sarfo
If one looks at the trajectory of Mr. Asiedu Nketia’s life, one must have nothing but full admiration for him. He was a palm wine tapper and a truck pusher in his youth. But he took himself off the farm and the streets and put himself through school, where he went through the ranks and ended up with a Cert. A Teacher’s certificate. Thereafter, he sponsored himself to acquire university education and ended up as a strong worker and helper in his community and society. So by dint of his teenage tribulations and the very path of Mr. Asiedu Nketia’s rise in life, he belongs to the New Patriotic Party, the party of self-made individuals and middle class achievers. So how he ended up with a party of questionable credentials like the NDC must be a mystical study for generations to come. His is a true example of the eagle amongst the chicks……….
Perhaps somebody considered his physical appearance and decided that he will fit perfectly into a party where a hungry look was once considered a qualifying feature for total acceptance. For the National Democratic Congress (NDC) was founded by Rawlings who, as a lanky junior officer in the Ghana Armed Forces, maintained a stockpile of Yoke Gari debts and an eternally hungry look in his eyes, just like Asiedu Nketia. This NDC founder had nothing by way of achievements in his life, or any leadership experience or impressive education. When Rawlings came to power, he knew nothing of leadership, politics, family life or scholarship. Besides, he had no discipline, having been sanctioned a number of times by his superiors. On one occasion, the extent of the furniture in his entire household comprised a helicopter seat, which he had surreptitiously cadged from the Air force base. Besides desperation, Rawlings had no qualifications that entitled him to lead a flock of deadbeats, let alone a whole country. Yet he was the one that burst violently on the political stage in a bloody coup that ended the lives of three former heads of states and thousands of Ghanaians. Thereafter, he co-opted national service persons, pseudo intellectuals, fake ideologues, non-entities and desperadoes to run the government of Ghana. I remember that when he appointed Akrasi Sarpong as the Regional Minister of the Eastern Region, the latter was an immature vicenarian whose modus operandi was to saunter around the streets in T-shirts and flip-flops, eating kokonte with his body-guards at the Koforidua Jackson’s Park. Under that pack of deadbeats and free-loaders who now ruled the land, success in life and prosperity were all anathema to be avoided on pain of death! And so Akrasi Sarpong dressed to reflect the new reality.
In those days, the qualification needed to join Rawlings’ cabal was a conspicuous neck-bone (then known as the Rawlings’ chain), a desperado’s disposition and a pile of personal debts and a knack for government largesse and extreme envy for others’ property and personal achievements. Under this rather dark dispensation, what a prospective member of the regime had achieved in terms of personal accomplishments must be next to zilch, and the record of one’s real and personal properties akin to a tabular rasa. This then was the junta in whom the masses of our people gleefully entrusted the destiny of our country, and their progenies are the present cackle of incompetent leaders under whose watch we are now squawking for redemption.
And I think that in at least one or two respects, Asiedu Nketia fit into the required credentials. He had a conspicuous “Rawlings Chain” and a rather hungry/desperate look in his eyeballs, features that immediately endeared him to the NDC cabal and earned him the affectionate accolade of General Mosquito. But here is where his entire qualifications end within the NDC. For the General is a man of great achievements and focus, a distinguished individual who fought in the trenches to improve his lot all by himself. Such a man has no business pitching camp with the party of usurpers and free-loaders whose destiny in life has been defined for them by the whirligigs of an ill-conceived coup d’état…….
Some of the things for which Rawlings is well admired by his followers are that as a leader, he never built a single house for himself but demolished many; he never advanced in his education but destroyed our education system, sending his own children abroad to study; he twice subverted our democratic system but is ironically credited as the builder of Ghana’s present democratic dispensation; and now we know that he never paid a penny for his children’s education but they had the best of education through the largesse of their grandparents. And according to his wife, he never received any salary as Head of State when he was presumed to be working hard for the country but began receiving salary now that he is sitting home doing nothing. But don’t forget that Rawlings is a person admired strictly on account of the fact that he did nothing for himself; but Asiedu Nketia is a great achiever who rose through the ranks in society pulling up his own boot-straps. That is why it is a mystery that he now belongs to the pack of do-nothing scoundrels Rawlings cobbled together to rule Ghana and whose progenies still hold the country in their talons.
In one sense therefore, Asiedu Nketia is wearing the wrong dress. He has been prancing around with the wrong jackets; the wrong clothes; the wrong party……and nowhere did this fact become apparent than when he was captured on the international scene resplendent in a flamboyant coat meant for women. Given that Asiedu Nketia is internationally well-traveled and has a wife who lived in Canada, it is reasonable to argue that although he started life tapping palm-wine and pushing trucks, he has enough orientation by now to know the difference in the genders and the clothes meant for each. But I think some over-powering spiritual force confounded his logic and made him a powerful metaphor for a certain message; and the message is that he has been in the wrong coat all his life as a politician: the wrong dress…..the wrong clothes…. the wrong party. The ancestors decided to send him a loud message that he is in the wrong place. Thus Asiedu Nketia should now humbly take off his wrong dress and take his place among the comity of his compatriots…those with stories to tell of how they rose through their own dogged efforts in life…… and succeeded through education, hard work and sheer determination; not through some sleight of hand, or through treasonable usurpation of power, or through blatant lies, or through open mischief and destructive jealousy.
But beyond the cross-dressing code the ancestors used to communicate openly to Asiedu Nketia, there is also the metaphor of his fashion faux paus which we must properly analyze. To do this, two biblical passages come to mind. The first is in Mathew 22:11-13 which reads, "But when the king came in to look over the dinner guests, he saw a man there who was not dressed in wedding clothes, and he said to him, 'Friend, how did you come in here without wedding clothes?' And the man was speechless. "Then the king said to the servants, 'Bind him hand and foot, and throw him into the outer darkness; in that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.'
In this text, a bunch of free-loaders who attended a wedding ceremony were expected to be appropriately dressed, and the one who was not properly dressed incurred the king’s wrath and was severely punished: he was bound hand and foot and thrown into the outer darkness!
The second text of interest is found in Revelation 7:13-15 and reads, “Then one of the elders answered, saying to me, "These who are clothed in the white robes, who are they, and where have they come from?" I said to him, "My lord, you know." And he said to me, "These are the ones who come out of the great tribulation, and they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. For this reason, they are before the throne of God; and they serve Him day and night in His temple; and He who sits on the throne will spread His tabernacle over them.”
The text above supports the notion that dress also reflects on character. Taken together, these texts shed further light not only on Asiedu Nketia’s personal shortfalls but also the inappropriateness of the NDC’s policies and the fact that the government has nothing good to offer Ghanaians. Now, if you consider that Asiedu Nketia is the personification of the NDC as its loud-mouth defender and eternal blabber, it is not far-fetched to say that he symbolizes the party’s failures in all their ramifications. Here is a party which has borrowed so much but has so little to show for it. Here is a party parading the most corrupt female species in government since independence. Here is a party paying out millions in fake judgment debts, and that concocts deception to fleece the people with projects like GYEEDA and SADA, and is now trying to rob the people with a so-called petroleum reserve fund at a time when the masses must enjoy the slump in world petroleum prices. Here is a government whose leader has a losing proposition, and has openly declared in defeasible terms that even the worst government does something small for the country. In short, here is a government wearing the wrong dress, just like Asiedu Nketia, a freak of a government whose code of conduct and fashion is wrong-ended and lopsided, just like its General Secretary.
So we are in trouble! And Asiedu Nketia’s fashion fiasco not only captures our present fate as a people being led by a bunch of somnambulist mountebanks, but also a government of charlatans and fake-mongers, aficionados of corruption and pretensions, air-heads, blockheads and simpletons who are lost in the measures needed to transform the country. Even if we fail in taking heed of the darkness engulfing us, or the corruption subsuming us and the hopelessness staring at us, don’t let us forget the imagery extended to us by the cross-dress of the party guru Asiedu Nketia , a.k.a. General Mosquito.
Just like the king ordered the free-loader in the wrong dress out of the wedding party, so it is now time for us to bind this government hand and foot, and throw it into the outer darkness for its corruption and ineptitude; we should consign it to where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. And in its place, we must vote for those who have struggled hard in life and come out of the great tribulation… those who have washed their robes and made them white…… These are those we must vote into power to rule the land of our birth.
Samuel Adjei Sarfo is a Doctor of Laws, Attorney and Counselor at Law, a Teacher of Lore, Certified High School English Educator, Researcher and Scholar. An edition of this article first appeared in his “New Statesman” Column called “Thoughts of a Native Son”. You can email him at sarfoadjei@yahoo.com
