By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Feb. 16, 2016
E-mail: [email protected]
Maybe if you are a diehard National Democratic Congress’ stalwart, your beacon of revolutionary enlightenment is Iran. Which is why President John Dramani Mahama would so pathetically brag about having been the first African leader to have paid an official visit to the Islamic Republic since Tehran initialed its nuclear-freeze deal with the United States and its Western allies (See “ ‘I’m First African Leader to Visit Iran After Nuclear Treaty – Mahama” Starrfmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 2/16/16).
Those of us who are old enough to remember, which means that we are at least 50 years old and up, the Iranian Revolution was the bloodiest of its kind in the late 1970s and throughout much of the 1980s. As a Christian of proud Presbyterian heritage, the Iranian Revolution, led by the implacably vengeful and self-righteous Ayatollahs, did not present the sort of charitable image that would have attracted those of us who equated religiosity and religious leadership with love and compassion.
In the heydays of the Iranian Revolution, ordinary citizens were routinely lined up on a daily basis and summarily executed by firing squad for crimes ranging from adultery – largely in the case of women – to suspicion of homosexuality, alcoholism and larceny or white-collar theft. And so when President Mahama lauds Iran for having staunchly backed African liberation struggles across the continent, it is not clear whether the self-professed Christian Ghanaian leader from a predominantly Muslim clan or extended family remarkably appreciates the stark hypocrisy entailed in such laudation or commendation.
In other words, the Islamic Republic of Iran may very well have staunchly supported the anticolonial struggles in various parts of the African continent, but did the reality of Iran’s own political track-record at home indicate any emulative conviction among its top leadership in the principles and practices of freedom and justice? In sum, if charity does not seem to have begun at home, as it ought to have been, then why should it matter at all if the patently most uncharitable of revolutionary governments doggedly promoted charity abroad?
I hope the Iranians, particularly the ordinary citizens of that country, are open-minded and enlightened enough to fully appreciate the fact that most Ghanaians do not have the flippant and morally vain mindset and attitude of their present leader. Indeed, so vainglorious is Mr. Mahama that when he became Ghana’s Transitional President, in the wake of the mysterious circumstances culminating in the death of President John Evans Atta-Mills, among the first pronouncements that he made was that he was the first Ghanaian leader to have been born after 1957, the epochal year of Ghana’s reassertion of her sovereignty from British colonial imperialism.
I doubt very much that most Ghanaian teachers and other civil and public servants whose salaries and wages have been hermetically locked in arrears for three months or more, as of this writing, have any use for the shallow fact of whether Mr. Mahama is the first post-independence-born Ghanaian to accede to the presidency. Such historical trivia may make him feel proud and even superior to the rest of his countrymen and women, but what does this purely personal achievement do towards the socioeconomic and cultural advancement of the country?
Indeed, I have absolutely no question in my mind, whatsoever, of the need for our country to forge a healthy and cordial relationship with each and every country in the world; nevertheless, pretending, nose-thumbingly, as if Iran has had any materially more significant relationship with Ghana than either the United States or Britain, for ready examples, is simply inexcusably farcical, to speak much less about the downright preposterous.
If, indeed, Mr. Mahama envisaged Iran to be so indispensable in the area of petroleum and gas exploration and production, why did it take the Kufuor-led New Patriotic Party (NPP) government to bring in American petrochemical engineers and investors from Texas to do the job? Where were the Iranians throughout the revolutionary shit-bombing tantrums of Chairman Jerry John Rawlings?
Childishly thumbing his nose, under the specious guise of Ghana’s Non-Alignment status, at the indisputably beneficent West does not do either Mr. Mahama himself or our country any good. And by the way, what has Mr. Mahama’s being the first African leader to have paid an official visit to Iran, in the wake of the latter’s signing of a face-saving nuclear non-production and non-proliferation pact with the Western Powers got to do with the producer price of cocoa in Ghana? A word to the…who?
*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs