Ursula Owusu
If they were not being craftily disingenuous, the members of the so-called Gratia Women of Substance Network, the civil society organization, would have boldly and frankly come out to identify themselves as a bona fide affiliate of the country’s main opposition party, namely, the National Democratic Congress (NDC). I did not personally hear or listen to the remarks that Mrs. Ursula Owusu-Ekuful, the Minister of Communications, is alleged to have made that raised the hackles of Ms. Theresa Gbekie, Executive-Director of Gratia Women of Substance Network, and her brash and brazen NDC associates, but the contents of the same, as they have been widely reported and publicized by the media, were smack on point (See “You Speak ‘Recklessly and Backwardly’ – Women’s Group Fires Ursula” Ghanaweb.com 2/22/20).
I would, personally, have finetuned the tone and delivery of the contents of what Mrs. Owusu-Ekuful had to say about the historical and political performance record of the operatives of the Rawlings-fangled National Democratic Congress, but I would not, in anyway, have changed or even modified a word or the phraseology of the same, for the simple reason that for a protracted 20-odd years, the Rawlings-led Ewe-packed and hermetically controlled junta of the so-called Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) and the NDC totally dominated Ghana’s political landscape and our political culture to the fascistic extent that it became practically an embarrassment, verging on outright criminality to identify oneself as a Ghanaian of Akan ethnicity, particularly as a non-Fanti Akan-descended Ghanaian citizen. It is therefore nothing short of the inexcusably absurd for Ms. Gbekie or Mrs. Gbekie – I don’t know the conjugal/marital status of the latter – to shamelessly assert that Ghanaians, as a whole, strenuously and fiercely fought around the clock to bring about the kind of enviable and civilized constitutional democracy that we presently and collectively enjoy.
This is the kind of mischievous revisionist historiography that may very well have prompted the Communications Minister to make the sort of nativist remarks that are attributed to her. For example, for nearly a decade, Chairman Jerry John Rawlings adamantly insisted that absolutely no other Ghanaian citizen was qualified and/or competent enough to be ceded the reins of democratic governance. “Hand over to whom?” Chairman Rawlings would imperiously and disdainfully demand. But, of course, some 20 years on, most Ghanaians have arrived at the most logical and credible conclusion that, in fact, the former Ghana Airforce’s Flight-Lieutenant is not the best or the most competent leader that our beloved country has ever had.
On the other hand, it is perfectly accurate to observe that absolutely neither of the two National Democratic Congress-sponsored leaders who succeeded the acclaimed NDC founding-father has an administrative track-record that rivals that of their former mentor and de facto kingmaker, especially in the case of the late President John Evans Atta-Mills, who, by the way, as scandalously incompetent as he had been, was, nevertheless, far and away light years more competent and patriotic than his immediate successor and protégé, to wit, Mr. John Dramani Maham, who, by his own public confession, is the vintage product of the Atta-Mills’ School of Woyome Praise-Singers. It is, as well, equally preposterous for the Gbekie Gang or the members of the NDC-sponsored and underwritten Gratia Women of Substance Network to maliciously allege that operatives of the Akufo-Addo Administration are clandestinely operating militia-training camps at both the Osu Castle and the Bundase Military Range in preparation towards the massive rigging of the 2020 general election.
As prime evidence, the NDC-sponsored Gbekie Gang members point to the widely discredited and amateurish filmic documentary titled “Militia in the Heart of the Nation,” produced by the Anas Aremeyaw Anas copycat, Mr. Manasseh Azure Awuni, the turncoat fanatical latter-day Mahama shill who has publicly and adamantly insisted that Candidate John Dramani Mahama, unlike President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, has an exclusively inalienable right to indulge in bribery and corruption because as a Ghanaian citizen, implicitly, of Akan descent, Nana Akufo-Addo ought to, perforce, be held to much higher political standards. The preceding allegation is rather ludicrous because it was Chairman Jerry John Rawlings, and not Nana Akufo-Addo, who established a private army, namely, the Lt.-Col. Larry Gbevlo-Lartey-commanded 64th Battalion of Infantry, to rule a democratic Ghana.
Today, I believe the latter commando-type military organization has been integrated into the mainstream of the Ghana Armed Forces. I have not checked the historical records, but it appears to me that it was former President John Agyekum-Kufuor who both dissolved and integrated the 64th Battalion of Infantry into the mainstream of the Ghana Armed Forces. This is the stark and incontrovertible truth; and Mrs. Ursula Owusu-Ekuful ought not, under any circumstances, whatsoever, stand accused of nativism and tribalism. These patently primitive sociopolitical and cultural behavioral traits almost exclusively belong to the unconscionable and diehard operatives of Ghana’s present main opposition National Democratic Congress and their supporters and associates. It is as simple as A, B, C….
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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
E-mail: [email protected]