Son of Jakpa Delivers Another Yuletide Payola The NPP Needs To Match
By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Dec. 30, 2014
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
Some Ghanaweb.com forum discussants, (actually the bulk of them are insult-trading snipers), have bitterly complained about why yours truly chooses to comment on nearly every single news item that gets published on the web about Ghana. And my simple riposte is that I can afford to; and besides, it is none of anybody's business what topics I choose to discuss in my columns. I also find such complaints to be rather amusing, because these bitching malcontents seem to find absolutely nothing wrong with radio and television talking-heads who swarm the airwaves on a daily basis jiving about issues over wich they have done little research and have little to talk about that is either intellectually stimulating or morally edifying.
Besides, unlike many of these social and political parasites, I have a tenured daytime job which I have been enthusiastically and studiously performing for nearly two decades now, and therefore have no need and urge asking to be paid. The other day, for instance, a self-absorbed rascal who has been peddling a package of spoiled produce called Freedom of Information Bill (FOI) had the chutzpah to accuse yours truly of picking on petty issues to spool endless yarns of much ado about nothing around them. Just why this pesky pest thinks that an FOI Bill is the most pressing socioeconomic need of the average Ghanaian citizen amuses in no small measure; but even more significantly, it embarrassingly reflects the abject lack of creative imagination and initiative on the part of those who cavalierly presume to epitomize the conscience of Ghana's democratic political culture.
It pretty much reminds me of bloody former first lady Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings accusing the key operatives of the terror-charged political machine founded by her psychologically conflicted husband of lacking an ideology, almost as if an ideology were a mouth-watering recipe for Ghana's economic development, instead of the sort of leadership foresight and diligence which are the bricks and mortar of effective national development. We shall come to an expansive discussion of ideology - whatever the latter may imply - in the yeomanly business of nation-building.
What sparked the composition of this column, however, was the rather terse Graphic Online propaganda report about President John Mahama's proxy presentation of "a cow, 16 bags of rice and some [unspecified gallons of] cooking oil" to the Greater-Accra Regional House of Chiefs. I wondered why the same gesture had not been made by the nine other regional ministers, as had been done by Nii Afotey Agbo, the Greater-Accra Regional Minister, on behalf of Little Dramani. At other times in the recent past, of course, President Mahama has presented a dozen or so Toyota Land Cruisers to these traditional rulers, once in the heat of the 2012 presidential election campaign. In that particular instance, the general reaction of the leaders of the main opposition New Patriotic Party had been to huff and whine and to risibly despair about the "prejudicial timing of such patent political payola payment.
Maybe somebody ought to remind the Akufo-Addo camp that politics is a game of naked bribery and corruption of our traditional movers and shakers, and then ideological and rhetorical brinkmanship. And if my Kyebi relative and presidential-wannabe is not prepared to play by the age-old rules of the game, then Nana Akufo-Addo had better count himself out of the game long before the get-go. You see, brass-knuckled politics is "a little bit of this and a little bit of that," as a bartender in the Spike Lee-produced and directed movie classic "Malcolm X" tells the starry-eyed protagonist, inimitably played Denzel Washington.
You simply cannot call yourself a serious politician and then merely feed fat on a stale and rancid good political record that only a couple of grizzled septuagenarians remember. And then vacuously serve a dinner-tray full of such fairy tales. Rather, serious political heavylifting is about haunching down and letting the seams of the seat of your pants rip apart; and then rolling up your sleeves and slinking down the drain to get oneself muck-caked and dirty like a worm-rooting drake.
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