By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
April 11, 2015
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
I hope Mr. Mahama does not really intend to follow up on his State-of-the-Nation Address' threat to return the ill-gotten properties of the erstwhile Nkrumah-led Convention People's Party (CPP) regime. During a "courtesy" call on him by the members of the so-called Council-of-Elders of the rump-CPP at the Flagstaff House, Kanda, recently, the President was reported to have promised to ensure the timely return of all properties belonging to the original Convention People's Party that were allegedly confiscated by the Kotoka-led National Liberation Council (NLC) junta "in the shortest possible time (See "Mahama Promises to Return CPP Confiscated Assets" Ghana News Agency / Ghanaweb.com 4/11/15).
Well, when I learned of the preceding, I nearly laughed myself off my chair. And if anybody is foolish enough to doubt the sincerity of Mr. Mahama, let me promptly offer for the moral edification of that unfortunate son/daughter of the soils of Ghana the indelibly and inexcusably scandalous example of Mr. Alfred Agbesi Woyome. I make this reference because Mr. Mahama also had the temerity to trot in the name of his Attorney-General, Mrs. Marrieta Brew Appiah-Oppong, as the cabinet appointee who would lead the patently quixotic attempt to retrieve the purportedly confiscated assets of the rump-CPP. And here, also, ought to be promptly recalled the fact that I have said time and again on these very pages that the people passing themselves off as the executive members of the CPP must not be confused with the old, Nkrumah-led Convention People's Party. The two political entities are not one and the same, the mischievous manipulation of Ms. Samia Yaba Nkrumah as the rump-CPP's Life-Chairperson notwithstanding.
Then also, couching his promise in terms of a general act of restitution does not help matters the least bit. And Mr. Mahama would be far better off attempting to return illegally confiscated private properties to their owners or the designated heirs of their original owners than embark on any criminal attempt to return the ill-gotten properties of the original CPP to its latter-day poseurs. It is also very ironic that the man presuming to right the egregious wrongs of past military regimes was himself a front-pew member of the longest-reigning military dictatorship in the country, to wit, the Rawlings-led Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC).
But what is even more significant to point out is that during the 8 years that the former Chairman Jerry John Rawlings ruled Ghana as an elected president, absolutely no laudable efforts were made to either reconcile Ghana's citizenry, particularly the legitimately aggrieved ones among us, or restore illegally confiscated properties to their owners. What is more, Chairman Rawlings, characteristically, wasted no moment to tag President John Agyekum-Kufuor's national reconciliation exercise as a flagrant charade that absurdly attempted to incriminate morally upright Ghanaian citizens like the half-Scottish waif. We must also pointedly put it on record that most of the properties acquired by the Nkrumah-led Convention People's Party were acquired via blatant extortion, such as involuntarily deducting 10-percent from the salaries of civil servants and other government employees.
You see, what is often not emphasized well enough is the fact that the late President Kwame Nkrumah envisaged Ghana to be his personal property and therefore had absolutely no qualms in fleecing both the State and its citizenry in flagrant furtherance of his oversized pan-Africanist ambitions, of which Ghana was veritably a mere stepping stone, and not the node or center, as some of his woefully misguided adherents presume. The preceding notwithstanding, it would be criminally foolhardy for anybody to suppose that the political party and government that regressively quartered up and literally sold the erstwhile Ghana Industrial Holdings Corporation (GIHOC) is incapable of following up on its most recent threat of robbing the hardworking Ghanaian taxpayer to mollify and economically pacify the scions and ideological heirs of the African Show Boy.
Fortunately, we have found a better and more constructive and civilized method for dealing with irresponsible politicians like President Mahama. And that method, of course, is called Election 2016.
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