By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Jan. 4, 2016
E-mail: [email protected]
Some 180 card-carrying members of the Korley-Klottey Constituency in Central-Accra have reportedly petitioned former President Jerry John Rawlings to prevail on his thirtysomething-year-old daughter, Dr. Zanetor Rawlings, to withdraw immediately from contesting the 2016 parliamentary election in that constituency, after having commandingly crushed her primary election opponent by 2,403 votes to 1,340 votes. Here in the United States, you could aptly declare the young medical practitioner a winner by a landslide. Her main opponent, Nii Armah Ashiety, is the incumbent Korley-Klottey National Democratic Congress’ Member of Parliament.
Well, I really don’t know what petitioning President Rawlings to prevail on his eldest adult-child to withdraw from the race would achieve. Very likely, the protesters would only end up throwing their massive and unreserved support behind Dr. Rawlings, who has herself been battling some child custody-related issues with her former conjugal partner – I understand the couple was not officially joined up in holy matrimony – Mr. Herbert Mensah, the former Chairman of the Kumasi Asante-Kotoko Football Club. The petition would amount to naught because although we are told that Dr. Rawlings entered the race with the full knowledge of the Korley-Klottey NDC Vetting Committee members that she was, indeed, not registered to vote, nonetheless, they still gave her the green light to contest that constituency’s 2016 parliamentary primary.
We must also highlight the fact that the former president had also appeared in the Korley-Klottey Constituency to vigorously campaign for his daughter. Very likely a notoriously rascally Mr. Rawlings was aware of the fact of his daughter’s not having been registered to vote going in. And to be certain, prior to the casting of the very first ballot, Dr. Rawlings’ official status as an unregistered member of the National Democratic Congress had been publicly raised. She had promptly parried off such objections by claiming to have been long registered as an NDC member by her mother, former First Lady Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings, who summarily renounced her membership of the party in 2010, after she had fiercely and bitterly challenged then-President John Evans Atta-Mills, recently deceased, and been soundly trounced.
It clearly appears that somebody who resented the guts of Nii Armah Ashiety, the incumbent Korley-Klottey MP, had decided that the best course for easing the latter out of office was to have another candidate with greater name recognition to knock Mr. Ashiety off the ballot. The petitioners are apparently hedging their bet around what they disingenuously term as Mr. Rawlings’ incorruptible belief in the “principles of justice, probity and accountability and hence must ensure that these values are upheld, even it means his [own] daughter would be affected.”
Now, this is a grotesquely tall order; and I can readily imagine this dirty old, greedy bastard mischievously tugging at his beard, chuckling and telling these equally cynical petitioners to go drink bucketsful of manure-mixed water from the Korle Lagoon. Principles of justice, my foot! He may even add for good measure. I mean, we are talking about a former sharp-shooting Ghana Airforce Flight-Lieutenant who literally dropped his entire umpteen tons of payload on the country’s Third-Republican Constitution, on the loony grounds that his Scottish Highlands-reared colonial expatriate father had abandoned him among the incurable barbarians of some godforsaken jungle called Ghana.
Besides, what was the entire point of throwing all his hefty weight behind the clichéd proverbial apple of his eyes, but to meteorically scheme to have Dr. Zanetor Rawlings become the first woman president of postcolonial Ghana?