By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Not long ago, when Ghanaian refugees began streaming into Northern Togo, the direct result of inter-ethnic mayhem in the Upper-East Region, one of Ghana’s two deputy information ministers vehemently denied that his country was faced with any refugee problem at all. And then literally caught with his pants down, Mr. Samuel Okudzeto-Ablakwa strained to play down the number of refugees camped by the Togolese government.
The fact of the matter is that one cannot take pathological liars like Mr. Okudzeto-Ablakwa seriously; at best, they are a gross national embarrassment. I was thus none-too surprised when following the widely anticipated gripping of Tripoli by popular anti-Gaddafy revolt, Mr. Okudzeto-Ablakwa was reported to have said that the Atta-Mills government would only begin evacuating Ghanaians resident in Libya, once their numbers were known and officially established. In other words, the Deputy Information Minister’s response was akin to taking inventory of the full contents of one’s household, even as the entire building was engulfed in flames. I would be damned if anybody were to tell me that Mr. Okudzeto-Ablakwa has absolutely no need for the services of a psychiatrist-cum-psychologist, particularly when the young, rambunctious NDC operative also impugns the patriotism credentials of Nana Akufo-Addo on the superficial grounds that the “Red Alerted” opposition leader had decided to skip Ghana’s 54th independence anniversary festivities. To-date, nobody has bothered to ask what input the NPP leadership had been called upon to generate while the program and preparations for such celebration were underway.
What is more, the very idea of the NDC sending out twenty invitation cards to the New Patriotic Party headquarters, just six days before the event, reeks of the unpardonably insulting. And the latter also makes it rather amusing when the NDC buggy riders accuse Nana Akufo-Addo of habitual lateness to significant national functions and other equally important sectional affairs. Rather amusing because fundamentally speaking, there is absolutely no significant difference between the habitual tardiness of key operatives of both the NPP and the NDC. Which is not to endorse this politically regressive attitude to national affairs, one way or the other.
Still, it is quite curious for Mr. Okudzeto-Ablakwa to have smugly implied that since quite a high percentage of Ghanaians entering Libya do so illegally, therefore, until a definitive account was taken of their total number, those Ghanaians who entered Libya legally ought to wait until their illegal- immigrant compatriots had been fully accounted for. In other words, why does Mr. Okudzeto-Ablakwa deem it appropriate for legal Ghanaian immigrants to be summarily punished for the misdeeds of their illegal-immigrant compatriots? What has also become glaringly evident and eerily so, is the evident support of the Rawlings-Mills government for the 42-year-old Gaddafy dictatorship. In the wake of the popular revolt that gripped Tripoli recently, the government of the National Democratic Congress issued a harshly-worded statement indicating that it was poised to prosecuting Libyan-returnee Ghanaian citizens known to have participated in the anti-Gaddafy revolt. We hope the United States and the other Western allies are taking good notice of the dictatorial and viscerally non-democratic tendencies of the Rawlings-Mills ideological camp.
A similar situation arose in the wake of the Ivorian electoral crisis and political stalemate between Messrs. Laurent Gbagbo and Alassane Ouattara, when three Ghanaian citizens suspected to be in the pay of the besieged President Gbagbo were arrested by supporters of Mr. Ouattara, the widely presumed winner of the November-December Ivorian elections. Back then, Mr. Ouattara bitterly accused the Atta-Mills government of the National Democratic Congress of being behind the apparent recalcitrance of his arch-nemesis and political rival.
On that occasion, as we vividly recall, Mr. Okudzeto-Ablakwa vehemently denied that any of the three captives had been engaged in anti-Ouattara hostilities. The Deputy Information Minister would further claim that all the three suspects were carpenters and builders who had resided in the Ivory Coast for at least two or three years. We must also significantly add that released names of the alleged suspects pointed to the fact of all three of them being of Ewe-ethnic extraction, which means that going by what we have come to know about the politics of ethnicity as it pertains to Ghana’s two major political parties, namely, the New Patriotic Party and the National Democratic Congress, the suspects were very likely either supporters or sympathizers of the National Democratic Congress.
What made the preceding even more intriguing was Mr. Okudzeto-Ablakwa’s claim that the suspects had actually entered an active war zone to help with reconstruction work! The minister had also promised to provide the Ghanaian public with further details; unfortunately, as of this writing (3/20/11), we had yet to hear from Mr. Okudzeto-Ablakwa on the preceding matter. But that President John Evans Atta-Mills should voluntarily sign onto the forcible ousting of President Gbagbo and then abruptly take to his heels on grounds of territorial integrity, says enough about the morally tattered integrity of the so-called National Democratic Congress.
*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 and author of “The Obama Serenades” (Lulu.com, 2011) ###