By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
April 30, 2016
E-mail: [email protected]
If by Ghana having been built on some salutary and progressive principles, Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings means the inscription under the country’s coat-of-arms, which is “Freedom and Justice,” then, needless to say, the founder-presidential candidate of the National Democratic Party (NDP) has absolutely no feet to stand on. It is also not clear what Mrs. Konadu-Rawlings means when she talks about “restoring our common sense, peaceful progress and improvement in our lives” (See “Our Priority is to Restore Common Sense – Konadu” TV3Network.com / Ghanaweb.com 4/30/16).
You see, the first problem that Mrs. Rawlings faces here is the inescapable fact that she has a 20-year bloody political record, which she equally shares with her husband, that cannot simply be wished away by cynically hoping that Ghanaians are totally bereft of long-term memory capacities. She will have an extremely hard time explaining precisely at which moment during her mean-spirited reign as Ghana’s first lady, when the people felt and experienced any remarkable sense of freedom.
For instance, why did the Adu-Boahen-coined political phraseology of a “Culture of Silence” come to gain traction and currency in the country during most of the 1980s and early 1990s, when Chairman Jerry John Rawlings ruled Ghana like an absolute monarch? You know, the Akan have a saying that: “If Madam Naked promises you a bolt of full-piece cloth, you just have to listen to her name.”
Indeed, it was far more than merely symbolic to garner from news reports that Chairman Rawlings and two of the couple’s three adult daughters, namely, Amina and Yaa Asantewaa, were present at the Accra Trade Fair Center when Nana Konadu was officially declared the 2016 presidential candidate of the National Democratic Party. That the position was not contested, being that Mrs. Rawlings is the founder-proprietor of the National Democratic Party, which ideologically, by the way, is only a mirror-image of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC), also founded by her husband, where presidential nominations are routinely conducted by executive edict or communist-type coronation, ought to give many a democracy-loving Ghana great cause for concern.
This custom-tailored “democratic” process is obviously what Mrs. Rawlings seems to be deliberately and conveniently confusing with the classical form of constitutional democracy enjoined by the country’s 1992 Republican Constitution. It ought to, therefore, come as little wonder that nearly all the key players of both the NDC and the NDP had to be protected by an Indemnity Clause inserted into Ghana’s Fourth-Republican Constitution in order to both qualify these morally reprehensible politicians to ply their thuggish trade in 21st-century Ghana, as well as protecting from being hauled before our law courts and rigorously prosecuted for their legion crimes against Ghanaian humanity under the specious guise of “revolutionary justice, transparency and accountability.”
Indeed, when she asserts that “Our greatest resource is the people of Ghana,” Mrs. Rawlings may actually be deviously celebrating the slavish manner in which the overwhelming majority of Ghanaian citizens were treated during the two protracted decades that the NDP leader and her husband ruled the country like their private property. She may have conveniently forgotten this – perhaps part of a psychological and pathological process of denial – but the rest of us need to constantly remind ourselves of the fact that Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings fiercely contested the late President John Evans Atta-Mills for the NDC’s 2012 presidential nomination in Sunyani, the Brong-Ahafo capital, in 2010 because she strongly believed that nearly every cabinet member of the erstwhile John Agyekum-Kufuor-led New Patriotic Party (NPP) government ought to have been rounded up and summarily indicted, prosecuted, convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labor. Not that the former Legon tax-law professor handpicked by her husband had not tried it and miserably failed.
Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings is a pathological fascist conservative in the mold of Mr. Donald Trump, the rabid white-supremacist billionaire currently running for President of the United States of America on the ticket of the Republican Party. Both Mrs. Rawlings and Mr. Trump use the same deftly coded language of hate to push their agenda. For instance, Nana Konadu talks about her National Democratic Party’s being “an all-inclusive party that understands that everyone has the right to help in the development of Ghana.”
The preceding, of course, is a thinly veiled jab at the country’s main opposition New Patriotic Party, unarguably the most ethnically balanced political party in the country. Mr. Trump also says the same thing, even while invidiously singling out Mexican-Americans as pathological rapists, thieves and drug dealers and barons who ought to be prevented from entering the United States. The leaders of the New Patriotic Party, in particular Akufo-Addo, ought to be extremely cautious not to, once again, cheaply fall for the devious flirtatious overtures of Chairman Rawlings as, for instance, the very self-righteous political cynic who once contemptuously called the NPP Presidential Candidate “That Dwarf, what is his name?” also recently commended the three-time NPP presidential nominee “an honest and courageous man.”
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