By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Legend has it that Mr. Johnson Asiedu-Nketia was a largely unknown quantity of an elementary schoolteacher, rampantly seducing and literally raping teenage girl-students, in the Brong-Ahafo boondocks, as it were, when one day the former Chairman Jerry John Rawlings took his flamboyant circus "revolutionary" act to the village of Seikwa, where the now-general secretary of the so-called National Democratic Congress taught Arithmetic and Elementary Algebra.
The storyteller goes on further to state that Jato Sogakope was in dire need of an interpreter, whereby the "Mosquito" leapt onto the podium with a Gari-Foto-Spattered mouth and barely managed, in his trademark of haltingly broken English, and started transmitting the malaria-infected populist message of Jato Sogakope to his people.
Since then, the Mosquito has served as a parliamentarian and a deputy Rawlings cabinet appointee. And then not quite long ago, it came to light in the national media that the NDC scribe, who also doubled as a board member of the Kufuor-minted Bui Dam Project, had also been shadily contracted to fabricate and sell the most expensively priced concrete blocks for the construction of the Bui Dam.
Anyway, confronted with the record of his flagrant ripping off of the Ghanaian taxpayer, Mr. Asiedu-Nketia would lamely claim that the quality of his concrete blocks was far better than those of his contractual competitors. As to why the chairman of the Board of Directors of the Bui Dam Project would allow other contractors who, reportedly, produced sub-standard blocks, at least according to the NDC scribe, to so criminally supply such schlocky products for the construction of the aforesaid landmark project has never been satisfactorily answered.
Well, what I am clearly implying here is that the pathologically rambunctious Mr. Asiedu-Nketia is a certified scam-artist who had everything to lose going into Election 2012, and thus fought tooth-and-nail to guarantee that the NDC hanged onto power by any necessary means. And this is precisely what he did in collusion with Messrs. Afari-Gyan and Mahama last December.
Interestingly, though, the NDC scribe appears to have been pricked by a twinge of guilty conscience; and it is for the latter reason that shortly after Dr. Afari-Gyan fraudulently called Election 2012 in favor of Mr. Mahama, a visibly shamefaced Mr. Asiedu-Nketia went on the air and squarely, and almost remorselessly, blamed an abject lack of vigilance on the part of the Akufo-Addo presidential campaign for the NPP's shocking loss of Election 2012.
You see, General Mosquito knows in his heart of hearts - and that is, if he really has a heart, that the Convention People's Party-leaning and National Democratic Congress-sympathizing Dr. Afari-Gyan had flagrantly and fraudulently called Election 2012 in favor of the then-Care-Taker President John Dramani Mahama. Dr. Afari-Gyan would also announce the total number of votes cast in the 2012 general election that was far in excess of the total number of registered voters.
Indeed, so shockingly fraudulent was the entire electoral exercise that even the former Chairman Rawlings, the man who has been widely accused of having rigged the ballot to an even far worse extent than the immortalized African Show Boy, would call for prompt investigation of the same, to the great ire and annoyance of his former minions.
Needless to say, the NDC scribe clearly appears to be living on a planet and in a universe of his own. But one thing he uniquely has going for him in a way that cannot be said for Mr. Kwadwo Owusu-Afriyie, the New Patriotic Party's general-secretary, has to do with the Seikwa native's inimitably buffoonish antics which have readily facilitated the establishment of Mr. Johnson Asiedu-Nketia as an institution and a formidable force to reckon with on the Fourth Republican Ghanaian political landscape.
One instance of his rhetorical and, one may aptly add, his dramaturgical inimitability occurred recently on the first day of the full hearing of the NPP electoral petition by the Atuguba-led panel of Supreme Court jurists. The petitioners, as was all to be expected, had brought to light the at once salient and disturbing fact of none of the respondents having filed their affidavits of counter-petition, a necessary and routine legal protocol, to be certain.
Well, Mr. Asiedu-Nketia rather ingeniously decided to comically and ironically turn the proverbial tables against the clearly winning side by claiming that like Junior High School Pupils, the NPP operatives were rather gratuitously insisting on being provided with already-prepared answers to their examination questions, even before entering the examination hall in order to take the same. This, in the opinion of Mr. Asiedu-Nketia, was a jolly signal that the NPP's case was crumbling (See "NPP Case Is Crumbling - Gen. Mosquito" Citifmonline.com/Ghanaweb.com 4/16/13).
You may not like this wiry and famished-looking man; but you definitely have to be honest enough to concede his unique sense of humor. Then again, whoever said that the NDC does not have its equally formidable riposte to the late President Saddam Hussein's "Chemical Ali," that fabulously optimistic Information Minister who kept exuberantly regaling the besieged Iraqi people with ornately acrobatic tales of miraculous and patently impossible exploits against the invading American ground, air and naval forces? Go figure!
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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
April 21, 2013
E-mail: [email protected].
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