By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
August 19, 2015
E-mail: [email protected]
In 2008, while campaigning in his native Gonjaland, in the Northern Region, the now-President John Dramani Mahama made the exact same statement that Mr. Kwadwo Owusu-Afriyie (alias "Sir John") reportedly made to Peacefm's "Kokrokoo" morning program host, Mr. Kwami Sefa Kayi. Back then, Mr. Mahama was campaigning as the Rawlingses' virulently disapproved running-mate of the now-late President John Evans Atta-Mills. The latter, as Vice-President to then-President Jerry John Rawlings, had twice been defeated by the now-former President John Agyekum-Kufuor who, in the summer of 2008, was a lame-duck premier reluctantly looking forward to a mandatory retirement that would see him globetrotting for the United Nations as a Goodwill Ambassador.
Now, we don't need to rehash what exactly caused the electoral defeat of the then-ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP). What needs to be painfully recalled is predicting that the stolid smugness of the key NPP operatives, which saw them vitriolically bickering over questions of nepotism and brazen collective self-hatred, was bound not only to cost the NPP Election 2008, it was also going to put the largest and most democratic political party in Ghana on the sidelines for sometime to come. Well, I vividly remember where I was when Mr. Mahama made his "being in opposition is very painful" remark. Seven years later, almost to the day, Sir John would also make the exact same statement.
This time, it would not be on the hustings or the campaign trail; it would be in the studios of one of the privately-owned radio stations in the country. There is a stark contrast in imagery between Mr. Mahama's take on the excruciatingly painful existence of an opposition leader and that invoked by Mr. Owusu-Afriyie, in Ghana's winner-takes-all Fourth Republican political culture. Obviously, this difference has to do with the geographical locations in the country in which the older Mr. Owusu-Afriyie and the younger Mr. Mahama were, respectively, born; Wonoo, in the Asante Region, and Damongo and/or Bole-Bamboi, in the Northern Region, depending on whom you talk to.
Mr. Owusu-Afriyie, in his Peacefm-studio joke, made a reference to the globally-renowned protein-deficiency disease of "Kwashiorkor," a word coopted into the modern-English lexicon from the Ga-language, having been made famous or, perhaps, infamous, by a Jamaican-British white woman doctor by the name of Cicely Delphine Williams (1892-1993), who worked at the Marie-Louise Children's Hospital, in Accra, from 1929 to 1936. For his part, then-Vice-Presidential Candidate Mahama used the metaphor of a horse or dromedary to describe Ghana and himself as a rider who had been rudely bumped off his beast of burden. He then promised his audience that once he had fought hard and succeeded in regaining the use of his horse, there was absolutely no chance of anybody's getting him off his hardwon saddle.
As I vividly recall, I was right in the waiting-room of my attorney, the then-seventy-something-year-old Mr. Charles Kirschner, an attorney who specialized in road accidents, reading a computer printout copy of a Ghanaweb.com news article on the current subject of discussion. I would write several articles warning Nana Akufo-Addo and his pumped-up or exuberant associates to watch out for the baneful desert sandblast that was the Mahama robber-baron train. I am pretty certain that only a couple of the New Patriotic Party operatives gave my warnings more than tangential attention. For the Danquah-Busia-Dombo Boys spent more time duking it out among themselves than shrewdly looking ahead towards their common good, and that of their supporters and well-wishers, over the long haul.
I highlight the stark contrast between the images used by Messrs. Mahama and Owusu-Afriyie, because one of the images reflects the purely transient and personal, if also selfish and self-centered, while the other reflects the unmistakably political, if also eerily megalomaniacal and exploitative. The fact of the matter, though, is that both political operatives are perfectly wrong and grossly mistaken. Being in the political opposition in Ghana simply gives our robber-barons a real taste of what it means to be a law-abiding ordinary Ghanaian citizen.
As a matter of principle, I have absolutely no sympathy for any Ghanaian career politician, irrespective of ideological suasion, although I am a great sympathizer of the New Patriotic Party as the better of two very bad political alternatives for the well-meaning, levelheaded and progressive Ghanaian citizen. I am just thankful to God that I don't have to battle it out with the hoodlum pack down there for survival.
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