By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
It amazes me how many a diehard supporter of the Rawlings-minted National Democratic Congress (NDC) is seized by a fit of paroxysm whenever the founding-father of the bloodiest political organization in the country confesses the stark truth about the fate and destiny of the Ghana Taliban (See “Rawlings Booms At Aflao, Says NDC Is Already In A Ditch” Modernghana.com 6/3/12).
Indeed, when the former chairman of the defunct Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) and the suavely morphed Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) asserts that the so-called National Democratic Congress has effectively driven itself into a ravine or a ditch, he is only being charitable – for properly speaking, the NDC is a douche bag – and it is only cognitively bereft who could be tempted to contradict him.
The problem, though, centers on how one decides to interpret the patently predetermined debacle of the NDC. Interestingly, what none of the major players caught in the death’s rattle crisis of the P/NDC would want acknowledge, perhaps because they morbidly feel secure in their sophomoric pretence of massive national naivety and/or ignorance, is the indisputable fact that from the get-go, as it were, the NDC’s raison detre was inescapably predicated on the mischievous appropriation of the popularity of Mr. Rawlings to perpetuate its political stranglehold on the country. In other words, the NDC party hacks have used their founding-father like a workhorse inasmuch as the latter has also capitalized on his iconic primacy to entrench himself and his image as an indispensable factor in the political equation of both the survival and relevance of the NDC.
You see, by 1989 or 1990, when most of the now-erstwhile communist/socialist regimes to which the PNDC had been blindly looking up to for leadership and/or taking its marching order from had begun collapsing, it became frighteningly obvious to the Dzelukope/Sogakope Latterday-Prophet of Revolution and his considerable following that in order for the PNDC to maintain any semblance of ideological and functional relevance, their pseudo-civic administrative machine had to acrobatically redefine and fine-tune its obsolescent “revolutionary” agenda and bully, as well as intimidate, its way back into its fast-slipping seat of governance.
And here, of course, needs to be pointed out the fact that the abstract concept of “Ideology” is one that is rather too sophisticated for the Abongo Boys of the NDC to fully grasp and appreciate – for theirs is an instinctively crude acquisitive sense of shameless robbery of the public till – much less confidently presume to publicly articulate the same to an increasingly global and cosmopolitan community. In the end, the party toughs would expediently settle on some chimerical mantra called “Social Democracy,” having aptly gauged the latter to be far less intimidating and acquiescently acceptable to a pistol-whipped national populace bent on leaving the bloody past behind.
In the end, though, it was primarily the cultic personality of Chairman Rawlings, the morally defeated and jaded “Junior Jesus,” that propelled the proverbial “Greedy Bastards” back into, this time, the electoral seat of governance. A London-based newspaper (I forget which) had conducted a brazenly neocolonialist agenda-setting opinion poll and jauntily concluded that, indeed, if Mr. Rawlings decided to run as a civilianized presidential candidate, he would handily defeat his rather complacent and wild-eyed political opponents. And guess what? This was precisely what transpired in 1991-’92!
The single factor that redounded to the especial benefit of the defeated “Tar-Baby Junior Jesus” was, of course, his quite wise and expedient decision to swallow his empty pride and dutifully kneel before the Bretton-Woods establishment to be charitably knighted as a poster-boy for the much-maligned and economically denuding and politically suicidal Structural Adjustment Program (SAP). The epic irony here, as extensively highlighted by this writer and others in recent years, is that it was his commendably bold and philosophically pragmatic decision to take Ghana HIPC even long before the latter economically redemptive formulation had been conceived and tested that earned President Hilla Limann the vicious booting from office by Mr. Rawlings and his rat-pack of PNDC cadres and Green Book pseudo-scholars. And so, really, what we have here is nothing short of sheer chicanery and felonious mendacity. This, in essence, is what the so-called June 4 Revolutionary Values is all about. For properly speaking, one has to fast-forward from AFRC to PNDC in order to arrive at any discursively relevant concept of “Probity and Accountability.” In short, June 4 was simply a “Stomach Revolution” provoked by a ragtag posse of a few malnourished junior-ranked members of the Ghana Armed Forces.
Indeed, to fully appreciate the preceding observation, one has to study such infantile policies as the imposition of “controlled prices” on consumable commodities almost none of which were produced in any appreciable commercial quantities in the country. Needless to say, this elementary school boy’s approach to the regulation and development of the Ghanaian economy would meteorically engender its effective collapse by September 1979, when the Limann-led People’s National Party (PNP) was conceded the reins of governance by Mr. Rawlings.
But that remarkable Ghanaian intellectuals like Drs. Obed Asamoah, Kwesi Botchway and Kofi Awoonor, among a host of other smooth-operating opportunists and frustrated ethnic nationalists, would be among the vanguard ranks of citizens knee-jerkily ready to sell the country down the proverbial creek is what Ghanaians ought to be talking about presently, in the heated lead-up to Election 2012. And interestingly, one must add the fact that the “Greedy Bastards” of Fourth Republican Ghanaian politics are not peculiar to and/or the especial preserve of the Woyome-financed National Democratic Congress. Rather, they are veritably bipartisan and anywhere in-between. Which simply means that while it is their godly duty to guarantee the massive and thorough “Tsunami-ing” of the National Democratic Congress from the theater of Ghanaian political culture, it is equally imperative for the electorate to be poised to unreservedly holding the feet of the leadership of the incoming New Patriotic Party to the proverbial fire of accountability, lest the nation that we now know and recognize as Ghana gets irreparably washed out to sea.
*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 Director of The Sintim-Aboagye Center for Politics and Culture and author of “Ghanaian Politics Today” (Lulu.com, 2008). E-mail: [email protected].
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