By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
August 6, 2014
E-mail: [email protected]
I really couldn't care less if former First Lady Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings decided tomorrow to rejoin the criminal hoodlum pack that operates the National Democratic Congress (NDC). What amused me recently, though, was to hear her assert that the party that she founded with her husband was too corrupt and thievish for her to consider rejoining (See "Konadu Rawlings: Corruption, Thievery Still Persist in NDC" Starrfmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 8/6/14).
Well, the conditions and circumstances under which she disgracefully left the Mafia juggernaut that is the NDC are bound to prevail for quite a long while. And, really, they have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with what she would have the woefully untutored and unsuspecting believe. And here may be recalled the fact that in 2011, staunchly backed by her swashbuckling, albeit widely known henpecked husband, Chairman Rawlings, Mrs. Agyeman-Rawlings disastrously attempted to unseat then-President John Evans Atta-Mills, in a devilish bid to resuming the democratically proscribed bloody and extortionate 19-and-half-year half-junta regime of her husband's .
She would be decisively trounced and booed out of the auditorium in which the NDC presidential primary was being held in the Brong-Ahafo capital of Sunyani. His blustery and all, it appears that Chairman Rawlings had been, predictably, too timid to tell his wife upfront that she was no presidential material by any measure or stretch of the imagination; neither was she any match for the admittedly lackluster President Atta-Mills, the former University of Ghana tax-law professor turned Mr. Rawlings' pet political poodle and virtual marionette, some critics maintained.
Even so, it was not all her fault. During the early 1980s, the then-Flt.-Lt. Rawlings had publicly told the global media that he intended to rule Ghana for at least two decades, after which his wife and partner-in-crime would take over and also rule for at least a decade. By the 1990s, unfortunately for the criminal pair, globalization had effectively ensured that the benighted era of the neo-feudal stratocrats was a thing of the past. But it would be flagrantly remiss not to recognize the inescapable fact that it was one giant of a man who had stood between the Rawlingses and the couple's super-primitive political agenda for the country. And that man, of course, was none other than the then-United Nations Secretary-General, Mr. Kofi Annan.
Legend has it that it was Mr. Annan who prevailed on the then-President William Jefferson "Bill" (Blye) Clinton to intervene in the political burlesque that was unfolding in Ghana, or there was the grim possibility of there erupting an apocalyptic civil war that was apt to dwarf all the other catastrophic pockets of violence then wreaking havoc on the continent.
What intrigues me here, though, is to hear the woman whose husband effectively destroyed the hitherto first-class Ghanaian tertiary education, even as the Satanic couple schooled their children in some of the most expensive institutions abroad, impudently claim that it was the Mills-Mahama government that thoroughly and systematically destroyed the country's educational system. I also don't know precisely what she means when Mrs. Rawlings accuses the Mahama-led National Democratic Congress government of being hopelessly mired in "unbridled thievery."
The fact of the matter is that no Ghanaian, up to the time of this writing, could confidently claim to have known the salary of the "revolutionary" Chairman Rawlings during the 10-year period between December 31, 1981 and January 1992, when the megalomaniacal Chairman Rawlings suavely and mischievously morphed himself into a faux-civilian and "democratically" elected president of Ghana.
I have put quotation marks around the adverb "democratically," because Chairman Rawlings is the first "popularly elected" leader in Ghana's postcolonial history to rule by the special insertion of an INDEMNITY CLAUSE into the country's Fourth-Republican Constitution. And, of course, Chairman Rawlings is also the most inventive revolutionary robber baron of our time.
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