By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
The caption of this article was deliberately chosen to underscore the depth of my disgust with the criminal awarding of the reportedly whopping sum of $4.15 million in judgment-debt damages to Ghana's bloodiest and longest-reigning First Bitch, Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings (See "Nana Konadu Confirms Receipt of $4 Million Judgment Debt" Daily Guide / Ghanaweb.com 6/10/14). For a clinically callous and irredeemably cynical woman who heartlessly collaborated with her half-Scottish waif of a husband and the hoodlum lot of the Trokosi National Congress to destroy hundreds of privately owned businesses in the name of "revolutionary justice and accountability," it is insufferably annoying to hear Mrs. Agyeman-Rawlings obliquely, albeit vitriolically, lambaste the Kufuor-led New Patriotic Party (NPP) for deliberately stalling her entrepreneurial efforts.
It would also be quite interesting to learn of how the 31st December Women's Movement so suavely morphed from being the Amazonian wing of the erstwhile Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), and a rights advocacy and a faux-socialist self-help organization, into one of the largest capitalist-oriented investment firms in Fourth-Republican Ghana. We are also told that the investment wing of the DWM, as the 31st December Women's Movement is popularly known, is called Carridem Development Company Limited, of which Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings is the CEO-for-Life. This story, for me, scandalously underscores the firmly held belief of those of us avid students of both the June 4, 1979 mutiny and the December 31, 1981 forcible removal of the popularly elected government of the People's National Party (PNP) as a veritable "Revolution of Envy."
Now, Mrs. Agyeman-Rawlings has the temerity to tell the Apau Commission, investigating the fraudulent payout of billions of dollars in judgment-debt damages, that her company deserved to be paid the afore-stated judgment-debt award because the Kufuor government thwarted her efforts at converting raw cocoa beans into cocoa powder, cocoa-butter and other assortment of cocoa products for export. This was after this damn bloody bitch had succeeded in entering into a contractual compact with an off-shore firm called China International Company which, we are told, had no official dealings with its home country's government.
Where it gets visibly fishy, and where I strongly suspect our local national banks had good cause and reason to smell a rat, as it were, regards how it came about that a Chinese - or foreign - company would own a 51-percent majority share, while the minority partner, Carridem, with a 49-percent share, would have the power to name the company's CEO, in the person of the blood-stained Mrs. Agyeman-Rawlings to run the company. Was this utterly bizarre arrangement fashioned out of plain stupidity, or it was simply the feint of a facade aimed at bilking the Ghanaian taxpayer for the good of the globally renowned savvy, if also cutthroat, Chinese entrepreneur? I strongly suspect that the correct answer lies somewhere in-between these two polar extremes.
The Trokosi Nationalist Congressman who would facilitate this criminal extortion of the Ghanaian taxpayer is a lawyer called Tony Lithur, whose wife, Nana Oye Lithur, presently serves as Minister for Women, Children and Social Protection. Well, if the latter portfolio sounds ironic, there is really the rub, in classical Shakespearean parlance. This is a curious kind of farcical "contronym," just like the ideational absurdity of the word "Democracy" in the name of the ruling National Democratic Congress.
The Black Maria Lady - and the obvious allusion here, of course, is to the vehicular abattoir that ferried the three Akan high court judges and the retired Ghana Army major to their Mafia-style execution at the Bundase Military Range on June 30, 1982 - also claims had her company received the Chinese-backed loan facility sought by Carridem, involving the relatively puny sum of $2.6 million, her Calf Cocoa International Company would have been able to employ 2,800 Ghanaian factory hands. At what livable wage levels, my dear reader? But wait, what makes the entire episode even more ludicrous is the apparently byzantine concatenation of companies that make up the Bloody Bitch Cocoa Company - pardon my broken Chinese, my dear reader, for I am nightmarishly as confused as the Daily Guide reporter who composed the article in reference.
Calf Cocoa International, we are told, is partly owned by Carridem. And just who is/are the other moiety of shareholders? I give up! Anyway, what is also quite fascinating is the palpably enduring hatred that Mrs. Agyeman-Rawlings appears to harbor for the Gonja Boy in the Flagstaff House, and has been harboring for Little Dramani ever since my late Uncle Tarkwa-Atta made the GYEEDA and SADA and SUBAH blunder of selecting the Bole-Bamboi petty chieftain as his right-hand man. Take a reading, dear reader: "From 2002 when the problem started, it has not stopped. It [has]carried through to the new government of 2009, and it is carrying through in the government of today," whatever the latter clause means.
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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
Board Member, The Nassau Review
June 11, 2014
E-mail: [email protected]
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