By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
After reading Mr. Emmanuel Owusu-Peprah's quite lambent-witted "Open Letter To Dr. Arthur Kennedy" (Peacefmonline.com/ Ghanaweb.com 6/6/13), I have decided to write a rejoinder that is more of a tribute in celebration and support of the remarkable talent of this young man who simply and humbly styles himself as "a young, ordinary member of the NPP, Ablekuma-Central Constituency."
Needless to say, his is no "ordinary" missive; it is the sort of cognitive, and cogitative, grist that ought to be made required reading for all well-meaning Ghanaian citizens of both major political parties. For it demonstrates above board, as it were, that we have a critical cache of youthful members of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), and perhaps even the National Democratic Congress (NDC) as well, whose creative and constructive energies need showcasing, but who may be sadly not being readily availed of such opportunities because of the treacherous egomaniacal tendencies of people like Drs. Charles Wereko-Brobbey and Arthur Kobina Kennedy.
I was none the least bit flabbergasted to see Dr. Kennedy emerge out of the proverbial woodwork and supersonically go to bat for Dr. Wereko-Brobbey. These two shameless opportunists belong together; they may not have the same feathers - they actually do not sport any feathers at all. What they have in common, my dear and younger brother Mr. Peprah, is that imperious sense of vacuous self-righteousness you so picturesquely captured from one of the great American naturalist thinkers, Mr. David Thomas Thoreau; the other great New England thinker of the period, of course, is Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Anyway, what I am unabashedly driving at here is that in reality, Drs. Kennedy and Wereko-Brobbey are "a majority of two." And one fervidly would that they could muster the treacherous courage of their convictions by joining the ranks of the key operatives of the so-called National Democratic Congress (NDC), wherein by their own publicly stated estimation, they are more apt to be granted the sort of rhetorical tolerance that they so direly seek and desire.
You see, while I have met him once and deliberately avoided a "flesh-pressing" handshake with him, nonetheless, I have quite studiously followed the writings of Dr. Kennedy and have absolutely no doubt in my mind, whatsoever, that the swagger-gaited little man is a deftly measured cross, or hybrid, between President Kwame Nkrumah and Chairman Jerry John Rawlings.
I know this for a fact because two of the best media pieces ever published by Dr. Kennedy are veritable praise-songs for the aforementioned postcolonial Ghanaian premiers, even as the former South Carolina physician has had occasion to vitriolically lambaste this present writer, for "flagrantly" envisaging the history of Ghana through the eyes of his relatives. For instance, in his article on Chairman Rawlings, Dr. Kennedy described the chief-assassin of the high court judges as "Agyewodin." In other words, Mr. Rawlings is the epitome of political achievement in Ghana!
In other words, by the preceding salvo, the critic had clearly meant that while he reserved every democratic right to highlight the perceived remarkable achievements of Messrs. Nkrumah and Rawlings, somehow, this writer had absolutely no right, whatsoever, to commend the equally sterling and statesmanly achievements of Dr. J. B. Danquah, Mr. William Ofori-Atta and, in our time, Dr. Jones Ofori-Atta.
And so it ought to be deafeningly clear to all, by now, that whatever reasons that might have motivated Drs. Kennedy and Wereko-Brobbey to join the New Patriotic Party have absolutely zilch/zip to do with ideological convictions. The bizarre and sinister absurdity of the attempt by Messrs. McHypocrite and McNasty to quixotically reverse the course of history, and thus ingratiate themselves with their NDC paymasters, will not wash.
You see, even far more talented and better resourced traitors across the ages never succeeded in reversing the inexorable course of history, especially where the target of such treachery was staunchly subtended by providential righteousness. And the sooner these two panjandrums and popinjays recover the constructive use of their cranial faculties, the better it would be for their badly contused public and political images.
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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
June 7, 2013
E-mail: [email protected]
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