Former president, Jerry Rawlings
By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
October 15, 2016
E-mail: [email protected]
In three decades, the lead operatives of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) have not changed their ways one bit. They continue to reason like envy-wracked toddlers who are in no hurry to go anywhere, as long as they are provided with their favorite toys, namely, access to raw power and the chance to wantonly misuse taxpayer money to promote their own selfish interests. Their whole concept of development entails throwing outboard motors at fishermen and distributing tampons to their prime targets of sexual abuse – i.e. elementary and junior-high school girls – at election time.
And so when Mr. Bismark Tawiah-Boateng, the Eastern Regional Chairman of the National Democratic Congress, recently asked eligible and prospective voters at Okwawu-Abetifi not to renew the mandate of the incumbent New Patriotic Party’s Member of Parliament, Mr. Bryan Acheampong, he was merely charting the inglorious time-disproven course established by Chairman Jerry John Rawlings (See “NPP Blasts NDC Chairman Over ‘Prostitute’ Comments” Daily Guide 10/15/16).
According to Mr. Tawiah-Boateng, the decision by the Abetifi MP to invest in several hotel businesses, in a bid to promoting the hospitality industry in the country, is tantamount to an unsavory promotion of prostitution. Perhaps we ought to remind the Eastern Regional NDC Chairman that in the spring of 1998, when then-U.S. President Bill Clinton paid an official visit to Ghana, Mr. Clinton and then-First Lady Hillary Clinton could not spend the night in the country, as the then most politically powerful couple in the world had hoped to do, because Chairman Rawlings and the NDC Abongo Boys had dismantled and quartered up nearly every state-owned hotel to investors from hostile Arab countries like Libya.
In other words, going by Mr. Tawiah-Boateng’s logic, it well appears as if the Mahama-led government of the National Democratic Congress would rather have foreigners come in and ravenously exploit and pimp Ghanaian women for humongous profits than have both our hospitality industry and the sex trade healthily managed and nobly regulated by Ghanaians themselves. But what is even more wickedly ironic is the fact that under the grossly incompetent Mahama regime, Ghana has produced more prostitutes in the country than at any time since 1957.
The NDC government also has the singular record of having sponsored the most expensive and high-class demimonde in the West African sub-region, by the name of Nayele Ametefe. And so it is rather amusing to hear Mr. Tawiah-Boateng accuse the Okwawu-Abetifi MP of promoting prostitution. By the way, when did the leaders of the first government to make the stripping of our womenfolk naked in public begin promoting human worth and dignity in Ghana?
The preceding also vividly recalls that moment in the era of the so-called Rawlings Revolution of acute shortage of toiletries, otherwise known as “essential commodities,” when an economically well-situated and comfortable Chairman Jerry John Rawlings, in a bid to destroying the businesses of the renowned lawyer and industrialist Mr. Akenten Appiah-Menkah, admonished Ghanaians not to patronize Apino Soap, the only decent and readily available antiseptic bath and wash soap at the time.
Of course, armed with a shoe-holstered pistol and surrounded by a platoon of AK-47-toting uniformed guards, nobody mustered the courage to ask Chairman Rawlings what other antiseptic replacement soap or substitute he had made readily available on the market besides Apino Soap. You see, NDC leaders like Mr. Tawiah-Boateng have made an enviable art of spewing abject inanities in public and not having to answer for the same, because they have the power and free access to the taxpayer’s money to back up such morally depraved and economically regressive political frivolities.
But even as Mr. Kinston Ohemeng Kissi, his Eastern Regional NPP opposite number pointedly observed to Mr. Tawiah-Boateng, isn’t it rather curious that President John Dramani Mahama would appoint Mr. Julius Debrah, the former Eastern Regional Minister, a hotelier and former Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Ghana Tourism Authority (GTA), as his Presidential Chief of Staff? Is Mr. Tawiah-Boateng hereby implying that in the homestretch lead-up to Election 2016, that President Mahama has been frenziedly pushing “The Prostitution Agenda”? The Nayele Agenda, I should say?
*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs