Fact for Murtala: Kufuor Performed, Mahama Deformed
By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
August 3, 2014
E-mail: [email protected]
This NDC politics of equalization nauseates me beyond description, if only because the players of this cynical game presume Ghanaians to be of such scandalously short memory as to have so soon forgotten that we spent most of the 1980s slammed-shut under the extortionate Rawlings-led Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) half-junta "Culture of Silence." During this period, the only group and/or class of Ghanaians who could publicly speak their mind with impunity were key PNDC operatives and that nondescript posse of fanatics called PNDC cadres.
This may well be the reason why Mr. Murtala Mohammed, the Deputy Minister for Trade and Industry, appears to believe that, somehow, Fourth-Republican Ghanaians have been faultingly favored by the Mahama-led government of the National Democratic Congress' decision not to challenge the TUC-sponsored massive demontrations that rocked the country recently.
Well, under our Fourth-Republican democratic dispensation, it is very clear that there wasn't much that Mahama go-fers like Mr. Mohammed could have done to stall or stop these widely popular workers' protests. In many a civilized democratic culture, such labor protests are universally understood and unreservedly accepted as part of the legitimate means of addressing poor working conditions between workers and management.
What got me especially interested in this subject, however, was Mr. Mohammed's widely reported outrageous comment that, somehow, President John Agyekum-Kufuor respected the Ghanaian worker far less than President John Dramani Mahama. The fact of the matter is that President Kufuor expanded our national economy at least four times the size of what it had been during the 19 protracted years that Chairman Jerry John Rawlings, founding-patriarch of the P/NDC, single-handedly and single-mindedly dominated the Ghanaian political landscape and culture.
What the foregoing means is that whereas President Kufuor created a lot of livable jobs, as well as remarkably improving the quality of life of the proverbial average Ghanaian, Messrs. Rawlings, Atta-Mills and now Mahama, had been hell-bent on systematically contracting the size of the country's labor-creation capacity. Which also explains the relatively limited number of labor-industrial actions, or strikes, under Mr. Kufuor.
Consequently, if, as Mr. Mohammed claims, President Kufuor felt deeply annoyed by incessant worker complaints, it was strictly because the former Popular-Front Party (PFP) Member of Parliament for Atwima-Nwabiagya, in the Asante Region, during Ghana's Second Republic, justifiably felt that the very people who had been effectively cowed into abject submission by the "necklace-creating" Chairman Rawlings, now felt themselves to be ironically at liberty to democratically express their capricious and scandalous ingratitude towards the most liberal and progressive administration in Ghana's Fourth Republic.
If, as Mr. Mohammed is claiming, President Kufuor called griping Ghanaian workers a lazy lot, this would not have been the first time that a Ghanaian leader was expressing such sentiments borne purely out of utter frustration. In response to what the country's first postcolonial premier envisaged to be the chronic lassitude of the average Ghanaian worker, President Kwame Nkrumah launched his quite famous "Work And Happiness" campaign in the early 1960s. Nkrumah would also establish his Workers' Brigade movement across the length and breadth of Ghana.
Mr. Murtala Mohammed, until he was named as a junior member of the Mahama cabinet, had served as a rump-Convention People's Party (CPP) executive operative, and so he ought to have learned something worthwhile about the subject of this column. It is also rather mischievous for the Deputy Trade and Industry Minister to pretend as if it was wholly out of the innate goodness of the hearts and minds of the key operatives of the P/NDC that Fourth-Republican Ghanaian democracy, as we presently know it, came to be firmly established on our soils.
Well, let me remind Mr. Mohammed of a few names that rank at the forefront of Ghana's epic struggle for democratic governance and culture as we have presently come to know it - J. B. Danquah, George Alfred "Paa" Grant, Emmanuel Obetsebi-Lamptey, Edward Akufo-Addo, Ebenezer Ako-Adjei, William "Paa Wille" Ofori-Atta, R. R. Amponsah, Modesto Apaloo, Kofi Abrefa Busia, S. D. Dombo, A. Adu-Boahen, Sam Okudjeto, Agama, Hawa Yakubu, A. Appiah-Menka and N. A. D. Akufo-Addo, among a legion of others.
Mr. Mohammed is also widely quoted as saying that "There wasn't anybody in government who had any problem with the [TUC-sponsored] demonstrations" that rocked the entire country on Thursday, July 31, 2014. Now, that is something that ought to worry Ghanaians!
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