By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Ph.D.
I have always maintained that the best way to court the sedulous attention of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) and its murderous pack of hoodlums is to take the battle to the Dzelukope-Sogakope Mafia. Finally, it appears as if the right people in the main corridor of Ghana’s political opposition are listening.
Anyway, what is significant about Nana Akufo-Addo’s alleged “All-Die-Be-Die” pep-talk to members, supporters and sympathizers of the New Patriotic Party in the 2012 presidential candidate’s stronghold of the Eastern Region, Koforidua, to be precise (See “NPP, NDC Fight Over Nana Addo’s ‘All Die Be Die” MyJoyOnline.com 2/10/11), is much less about the speech, or remark, itself but the willingness of the key players of the NPP to actually follow it up with the establishment of self-defense clinics, or training camps, for party faithful throughout the country pronto, as it were.
What is funny about the predictable reaction of the top-echelon membership of the so-called National Democratic Congress is the rather benighted and downright hypocritical presumption that, somehow, the NDC is the only major political organization in the country that reserves the extra-constitutional right to sic their human attack dogs – or pit-bulls – on their political opponents whenever and wherever the Rawlings posse deems the same to be expedient, even as most of their key operatives are mischievously and unconstitutionally protected by some bizarre Indemnity Clauses criminally appended to Ghana’s Fourth-Republican Constitution, as was traumatically witnessed in the Volta Region during the 2008 general election.
Anyway, I don’t know what Deputy Information Minister Samuel Okudzeto-Ablakwa means by his patently baseless and outright nescient accusation of “tribalism” against Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, when, historically and routinely, it has been pathological Ewe supremacists like Prof. Kofi Nyidevu “I am First and Foremost an Ewe before Ghanaian” Awoonor and Togbui Jerry John Avaklasu Rawlings who have been spewing unprovoked tribal animosity left and right, even while these two war-mongering terrorists were conjugally affiliated with Ghanaian women of Akan ancestry – talk of Hitler and Hannah Arendt!
Somebody better remind Anlo-Ewe nationalist Okudzeto-Ablakwa that it was the Rawlingses, Amedekas and the Tsikatas who unconscionably planned and callously orchestrated the Mafia-style assassination of the three Akan Supreme Court judges and the retired Ghana Army major.
Interestingly, today, a cousin of Major Sam Acquah, Brig.-Gen. Joseph Nunoo-Mensah, stolidly serves as National Security Adviser to the regime of the National Democratic Congress. Remarkably and ironically, on June 30, 1982 when the Rawlings-led Provisional National Defense Council – did I hear somebody say “Provisional Ewe National Defense Council? – contracted the dastardly execution of the three Supreme Court judges on the Accra Plains, it was Capt. Kojo Tsikata who held the cabinet appointment of National Security Adviser.
In other words, what I am unmistakably implying here is that if any ethnic group of Ghanaians reserved the right to propagandistically counseling collective self-defense to their members, supporters and sympathizers, that group of Ghanaians, or even individuals, definitely does not share descent or ancestry with Mr. Okudzeto-Ablakwa.
And here, I must also hasten to add that what is being meticulously and systematically advocated is not revenge or vengeance, but an effective means of guaranteeing in perpetuity that the clinically murderous likes of the Rawlingses, Tsikatas and De Souzas never again dare to declare an open season of genocide and terror against Ghana’s Akan majority and our legion and teeming non-Akan relatives, friends and allies!
Thus, unlike what some NPP “stalwarts” would have the world believe, Nana Akufo-Addo did not speak either out of season or “inappropriately” when he obliquely cautioned the demented Ewe supremacists against mistaking Akan cultural and moral peacefulness, or placidity, for innate cowardliness. Rather, Nana Akufo-Addo spoke like a veritable descendant of Otumfuo Osei-Tutu I and Osagyefo Owusu-Akyem Tenten.
And still on the sticky and quite treacherous question of “tribalism,” perhaps Mr. Okudzeto-Ablakwa ought to be invited to Parliament to explain precisely why operatives in the Ho-Abutia area of the Volta Region nearly mauled Dr. Sammy Ohene, Head of the Psychiatry Department at the University of Ghana and a staunch member of the New Patriotic Party, to death in the heat of Election 2008.
In brief, Mr. Okudzeto-Ablakwa screams rather too loudly and hypocritically on the question of “tribalism.” And here, also, I must quickly add that Dr. Sammy Ohene, a brother of Ms. Elizaneth Ohene, the renowned journalist and minister-of-state in the Kufuor administration, who likely sustained permanent and irreversible optical damage, was subjected to the kind of bestial beating that one would ordinarily not even administer to a violent dog, simply because of his Akan name!
But that such egregious political act of untold savagery is increasingly becoming uniquely identified with Anlo-Ewe malcontents and ethnic supremacists, is what Mr. Okudzeto-Ablakwa ought to be addressing himself and his ethnic and ideological kin and constituents. Unfortunately, like most of his fellow NDC ideological soul-mates, Mr. Okudzeto-Ablakwa seems to prefer hypocritical self-indulgence to the kind of level-headedness that is the hallmark of a statesman.
Maybe the entire nation needs to be reminded of the fact that in the run-up to Election 2008, it was Messrs. John Evans Atta-Mills and Kofi Nyidevu Awoonor, the NDC chairman of the Council-of-State, and not Nana Akufo-Addo, who were invited by the British High Commissioner to Ghana to explain themselves, in the shocking, albeit all-too-predictable, wake of the now-President Atta-Mills’ vow to “rain hell and Kenya” on Ghanaian citizens, should the NDC pull up short of either the Osu Castle or the Flagstaff House.
*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 “The Obama Serenades” (Lulu.com, 2011). E-mail: [email protected].
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