By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
I am not sure that I can whole-heartedly agree with Mr. Dan Botwe, when the former Information Minister in the Kufuor-led New Patriotic Party (NPP) government admonishes the Ghanaian electorate to “punish” the Mills-led National Democratic Congress (NDC) government for supposedly lying to the public about the extent of general maladministration and abject corruption that allegedly characterized the Kufuor government (See “Dan Botwe: Ghanaians Should Punish NDC in 2012” MyJoyOnline.com 5/7/11).
It goes without saying that voting the National Democratic Congress out of power does not necessarily imply any punitive measure on the part of the Ghanaian electorate. If anything at all, it is the Mills-Mahama regime that continues to gratuitously punish Ghanaians with rank administrative incompetence and a total lack of vision for the development of our country. Consequently, voting the NDC out of power simply implies guaranteeing that the Rawlings-Mills posse does not get the patently undeserved mandate, once more, to wantonly continue to arrest the development of Ghana.
Interestingly, I also vehemently disagree with the Member of Parliament for the Okere constituency that the gaping failure of the Mills government to convict and jail a remarkable number of Kufuor cabinet appointees is any salutary sign that, indeed, the New Patriotic Party was a corruption-free political machine. Nothing could be farther from the truth. To be certain, under President Kufuor’s tenure, the perception of corruption index was said to have reached hitherto unprecedented levels. And in the political arena, it goes without saying that perception, or image, is almost invariably all that matters.
And while, of course, there can be no gainsaying that the Kufuor administration is the finest, so far, in Fourth-Republican Ghana, nevertheless, it did not help matters that Mr. Kufuor, himself, did not often constructively strategize well enough to significantly cause an abatement in the perception of rank corruption in his government. Rather, the former President preferred to cavalierly and, if one may aptly say so, counter-productively, riposte that the act of corruption and its perception had been a part and parcel of human nature since the creation of Adam and Eve.
In sum, had he vigorously mounted the sort of image-making campaign currently engaged in by the NDC, such as the hosting of sectional policy fairs to apprise the public of exactly what the individual cabinet portfolios are functionally about, for good or ill, the proverbial elephant would not have been so readily herded back into the rainforest in the avoidably humiliating manner in which it was, with even a presidential campaign communications director voraciously feasting off the rank fodder of such defeat, in the dubious name of an Americanesque kiss-and-tell stock-taking.
What must also be significantly taken into account is the quite admirable decision of President Mills not to pursue an at once myopic and barbaric policy of vendetta by unwisely concentrating the nation’s resources on the indiscriminate and inexorable indictment of key operatives of the now-opposition New Patriotic Party. Needless to say, those of us who have been studiously following dastardly attempts by Mr. Rawlings, his wife and their hangers-on to sidetrack the Mills government cannot help but vividly recall the fact that such public bickering and animosity primarily stems from President Mills’ adamant determination not to turn his government into another self-serving bout of a December 31st pseudo-revolution, one that is dominated by judicial witch-hunting. The latter also pretty much reflects the crusading attempts by that section of the Rawlings-leaning membership of the National Democratic Congress to impugn the integrity of the entire Ghanaian judicial system.
On the foregoing score, therefore, Mr. Botwe is woefully mistaken in his rather curious observation that “the bashing of President Mills by former President Rawlings and some NDC members[,] such as the MP for Lower-Manya [Krobo][,] Mr. Michael Teye Nyaunu, [is] not far-fetched[,] as they are just asking the President to fulfill the promise [that] he made to Ghanaians prior to the 2008 elections.”
Now, fellow Ghanaians, let us get real here. And the simple fact of the matter is that Mr. Rawlings and his Anlo-Ewe cohorts continue to perceive the condign prosecution, conviction and incarceration of the “home-boy” likes of Messrs. Tsatsu Tsikata, Dan Abodakpi and Selormey as a repugnant Ewe “judicial black-eye” that must be evened out, or settled, by hook or crook. It is, essentially, this perceived failure on the part of President Mills to lock up enough ethnic Akan former cabinet operatives under the Kufuor administration that is driving former President Rawlings’ unholy campaign to impose his wife and staunchest criminal accomplice, Nana Yaa Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings on the Ghanaian people. Already, the former longtime first lady has more than proven her “retributive credentials” by not only facilitating the assassination of the three Akan Supreme Court judges and the retired Ghana Army major, but even more significantly by demonstrating her abject lack of beneficent maternal instincts beyond the bounds of her nuclear family, by exuberantly serving as the Chief Matron of the infamous, Osu Castle-based “Identification Haircut” cottage industry.
Naturally, Mrs. Rawlings is, in the eyes of her former strongman husband, the ideal replacement for the visibly ailing President Mills because, as a bona fide Akan-descended Ghanaian, her facile complicity in the judicial railroading of other Akan political operatives to the appeasement of her husband is unlikely to raise many eyebrows, at least in theory.
*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 (DI) and the author, most recently, of “The Obama Serenades” (Lulu.com, 2011). E-mail: [email protected]. ####