By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
He wickedly and callously manufactured a videotape fabrication that he arrogantly claimed to be the proverbial smoking-gun to the brutal regicide of Ya-Na Yakubu Andani II which, for some suspiciously unknown reasons, the Mills-Mahama government had flatly refused to appropriate in its bid to bringing the alleged assassins of the Dagbon overlord to book. The subtext here, of course, was that, somehow, President John Evans Atta-Mills, whom he prefers to call “The Traitor,” had adamantly refused to appropriate the contents of such video fabrication in a bid to shielding some lassie partisans of the opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) with whom Tarkwa-Atta had, curiously, decided to forge a common cause.
Anyway, to hear Attorney-General Martin Amidu tell the public about the forensically unsustainable contents of the Ya-Na videotape makes one question the IQs of those Ghanaians who twice elected this intellectual basket-case as the first president of our Fourth Republic (See Okoampa-Ahoofe’s “Agreed: Rawlings Needs Psychiatric Examination” Ghanaweb.com 6/25/11). You would have thought that a shamefaced Mr. Rawlings would issue an apology to the Dagbon royal family. Instead, we have Sogakope Jeremiah loudly, shamelessly and vacuously threatening to launch a libel suit against any media operatives who attempt to get in the way of the Dead-On-Arrival (DOA) presidential ambitions of Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings.
What is rather risible here is that it appears that the former strongman’s real beef, as it were, is actually a British-born former diplomat called Mr. Craig Murray, who has been tweaking the half-Scottish nose of Sogakope Jeremiah and has also been cracking at the fast-sagging gonads of the disaffected Grand-Wizard of the so-called National Democratic Congress for quite awhile now. And since he diffidently and definitely knows fully well that he has absolutely no legal edge on Mr. Murray, Mr. Rawlings has no other recourse but to intimidate Ghanaian reporters and publishers who generously give vent to the quite well-researched and systematically documented evidence of bribery and corruption against the bloody couple and their unconscionable cohorts of the National Democratic Congress (See “Rawlingses Warn Against False, Libelous Publications” (Ghanaweb.com 6/26/11).
In other words, in Mr. Craig Murray, the infamous bloody couple appears to have met more than their match. For not only does Mr. Murray appear to have effectively gotten under the skin of the bloody couple, as it were, but even more significantly, the former British diplomat appears to have drawn the worst aspect of the character of these perennial partners in a legion acts of wanton criminality. For starters, in presuming to cavalierly intimidate media critics and opponents of Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings’ foolhardy presidential ambitions, the bloody couple have, once again, eerily put Ghanaians on high alert that given another highly unlikely shot at the presidency, the long-abrogated Criminal Libel Code could be back in action, with the bloody couple jailing any perceived media opponents left and right without any formal judicial recourse of appeal, let alone the constitutionally mandated right to a speedy trial, or even any trial at all.
The problem here is that even as the bloody couple adamantly and fatuously buried their heads in the sand, hoping that a handpicked President John Evans Atta-Mills would carry forth their dirty “revolutionary” activities, time and tide weighted in on the side of democratic political enlightenment. And it is the latter state of affairs which Mr. and Mrs. Rawlings appear to be having an insurmountably hard time in coming to grips with.
*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is a Governing Board Member of the Accra-based Danquah Institute (DI) and author of twenty-two books, including “The Obama Serenades” (Lulu.com, 2011), his most recent volume of poetry. E-mail: [email protected].
###