By Francis Kwarteng

“…Don’t be an extension of the executive arm of government but rather an effective advisory body that will engage the Presidency to work effectively to meet the needs of the Ghanaian people. We will ensure that the necessary logistics are provided for you” (“Don’t Be My Bootlickers—Akufo-Addo Tells Council of State,” Ghanaweb, February 27, 2017).

AKUFO-ADDO MUST STOP FEEDING OFF THE HELPLESS GULLIBILITY OF GHANAIANS

The Ghanaian body politic is a worm-infested carcass.

That is exactly what it is, a worm-infested carcass of unimaginable stench.

In the main, the helpless soul of this worm-infested carcass derives its deadly stench from the popular gullibility of the Ghanaian body politic.

That is to say, popular gullibility and headless sycophancy constitute the normative underpinnings of Ghana’s open-defecation democracy.

This headless sycophancy of an open-defecation democracy is championed by a ruling class of Dung Beetles, with a functional profile of mentation circumference less than that of Kweku Ananse’s.

The Ghanaian politician who thinks he is supremely more important than the mortal embodiment of wisdom, of intelligence, that is, is also a domineering deity capable of the grudging totality of theosophical wisdom, acquirable through the contaminated cesspit of political theology, largely of the Rev. Owusu Bempah and Bishop Obinim types.

The innocent-looking Ghanaian political hyena, the newly discovered essence of Orwellian stupidity, is therefore the face of political wickedness in high place, the corridors of power.

The headless sycophancy, the mindless infatuation with mediocrity, all of these add to the emotional fuel powering the rusty engine of Ghana’s open-defecation democracy, borne on the sagging shoulders of the needless longsuffering disposition of the Ghanaian milquetoast, alone, who only knows how best to carry his muffled borborygmus in his buttock cleavage.

That is why the Ghanaian body politic is in such a rigors-mortis state, of a repulsively stinking carcass.

We find our much-cherished, much-touted open-defecation democracy also in that stinking concomitance of an Orwellian carcass.

This is why Akufo-Addo can confidently tell his newly constituted rubber-stamp Council of State, a wasteful resource, and the general public that, among other expectations, these members of the Council of State should not be bootlickers, an alternative fact quite in keeping with the Orwellian antithesis of political realism.

Let’s just also say the Council of State is a useless institution, part of the entrenched framework of institutional corruption. Members of the Council of State are not even as important and beneficial to the exercise of nation-building as guide dogs. They are blood-sucking parasites and fiends. What’s more, it is an unnecessary drain on the nation’s limited resources. Therefore the earlier the Ghanaian body politic deworms them, the better for it.

The Council of State, a dummy light of sorts, is a toothless bulldog because the useless constitution says so. In effect, the constitution technically makes the institution a bootlicking scarecrow with no mean standing in a stinking carcass. This is why it tags the presidency like a faithful dog, and this is also why the constitution assigns it an advisory character. Its decisions are not binding on the executive and Akufo-Addo knows this.

In other words, Akufo-Addo, himself a bootlicker to the political establishment and global capitalism, sets himself up in a captivating climate of Orwellian doublespeak, typical of all our post-1966 tongue-in-cheek drooling politicians.

They should not be bootlickers simply because Akufo-Addo wants them to be exactly that, bootlickers.

A situation not unlike the pot calling the kettle black. Or vice versa.

Between the two however, the pot and the kettle, namely, exists an intrinsic truth in the nature of man which political expediency can never erase, suppress, or belie.

Again, a situation very much like masking the human face. The point is that the mask does not change the fixed configuration of the human face. It is the same when the human face cries or laughs. And it always returns to its original state of naturalness no matter what the equation of calling.

Namely, the underlying string theory of the human face remains explicably the same nonetheless. In fact, the mask merely adds to the already rich meaning of the human face in whatever shape or form it assumes in direct or indirect response to internal or external prompts, to act a certain way.

The human face therefore follows a natural rhythm in point of taut or inflexible textuality. As a matter of fact the dodgy Ghanaian political nature is of this complex wavelength of inflexible textuality.

Bootlicking exemplifies this tricky characterology of human psychology insofar as the political nature of Ghanaians is concerned. The Ghanaian will willingly defer everything, including his anthropogenic-derived abject material and spiritual conditions, to God even if that God is the Devil himself, that is to say, himself, to say the least.

Political theologians such as Rev. Owusu Bempah and Bishop Obinim cannot tell this Devil from God. It is not surprising that bootlickers like Akufo-Addo will fall for the theological and doctrinal shenanigans of Rev. Owusu Bempah.

A leader, who allows fetishistic conmen of the caliber of Rev. Owusu Bempah and T.B. Joshua to invade and undermine his rational faculty, with juicy but irrelevant prophecies, is, no doubt, a case study as a functional victimology of clinical sycophancy. We have seen this problem in the political, spiritual and intellectual biographies of leaders such as Akufo-Addo and John Atta Mills, late.

The emotional degree of a typical Ghanaian’s sycophancy is therefore, certainly, one of heightened clinical concern. It borders on what Dr. Kofi Kissi Dompere calls “irreducible ignorance.”

The political mind of the average Ghanaian in this context is therefore a sleeping, hibernating sloth, and at the same time a potential victim of the clinical symptomatology of what, again, Dr. Dompere calls “cognitive imbecility.”

In fact cognitive imbecility, a clinical indictment of a sleeping political mind deeply rooted in universal infatuation with Eurocentrism, and a strong critique of that political mind’s detachment from an oversight of African-centered realities, is a social pandemic across both Ghana and Africa.

In a nutshell, unthinking sycophancy has put the entire nation and its leaders such as Akufo-Addo in a panic mode of arrested development, of a clinical psychological-prison of sorts, from which it is virtually impossible to break out. It is more like a vicious circle that will not make Akufo-Addo potentially different from his predecessors, and of course with Kwame Nkrumah excluded from the cesspit of post-independence Ghanaian leaders.

These leaders who have turned Ghana’s national anthem “God Bless Our Homeland Ghana” completely upside down, “God Curse Our Homeland Ghana,” are all blind. They have also made Ghanaians strangers in this “homeland” called Ghana, a country where Akufo-Addo’s plagiarized inaugural speech could not tell “Third World Standards” from “First World Standards.” This “homeland” is now the center of gravity of galamsey-driven pollution, a greedy collaboration between foreign nationals and some of these sycophantic crazy-baldhead politicians.

What is more, some members of the Council of State have even been fingered in the sensational car theft following the transfer of power between the NPP and the NDC. The partisan vigilantism of the Invincible Forces and the Assets Retrieval Task Force, so-called, and political plagiarism are also everywhere but members of the clergy have chosen “culture of silence” and the politics of convenience over righteous indignation in addressing issues of social injustice because it is their favorite party that is in power.

Instead, they have chosen to be at spiritual war with fufu by attacking it of being monolithically unhygienic, gastronomically unwholesome. Some of these opportunistic clerics sometimes choose their enemies, fufu, say, out of emotional convenience—to say the least. Yet the “Temple of Rubbish” or the “Rubbish of Babel” sits on their helplessly sanctimonious, bulbous noses.

Yes, they are part of the ruling elites who have held the country to ransom, and more particularly so given that they have also usurped and appropriated the transcendental powers, spiritual personality and presence, all for themselves, alone, supposedly, as the country rots even as they numb the critical faculties of their largely sycophantic following. Ghana is indeed at war with itself.

These are the same clerics who have embraced the conspiracy of silence as this “homeland” is gradually being turned into a galamsey-polluted desert of dead human-cacti. No wonder succeeding leaderships of this largely galamsey-polluted Orwellian “homeland” has progressively converted Nkrumah’s Ghana into a worm-infested culvert of internal colonialism for the vast majority of Ghanaians, a sad state of affairs for which the sycophantic, self-seeking Council of State is partly to blame.

And, lest we forget, bootlicking is what Ghanaian open-defecation democracy is all about. Bootlicking is the mournful soul that defines and undergirds the Orwellian sycophancy of the Ghanaian.

Everything aside, who does the Indemnity Clause protect or grant immunity to: The president or a member(s) of the Council of State? Of course, the president. This is because the president enjoys unlimited immunity under the national constitution, a sacrosanct constitutional guarantee denied to the constitution of the Council of State.

This is probably also why the office of the presidency is a fecund source of political criminality and impunity, as well as of the executive exercise of coercive power, of the abuse of incumbency and, finally, of open display of arrogance of power.

The advisory capacity of the Council of State makes it a piper tiger. In other words, the Council of State does not exercise any of the afore-referenced powers as its advisory designation does not supersede the executive powers of the presidency.

In this larger sense, the thick wall of separation between the nominal authority of the Council of State and the near-unlimited powers of executive dominance which the presidency enjoys is the real deal, in addition to the fact that the presidency also enjoys the powers of decisional discretion where the advisory authority of the Council of State is non-binding.

That is, where the decisions of the Council of State are not binding on president. The question essentially boils down to the Council of State being a body of children walking in the shadows of executive prerogatives and privileges. This body of children is like those children guitarist George Benson and Whitney Houston emotionally sang about on “The Greatest Love of All,” children who needed some direction or guidance while growing up, building self-confidence and what have you:

“I believe the children are our future

“Teach them well and let them lead the way

“Show them all the beauty they possess inside

“Give them a sense of pride to make it easier…

“I decided long ago, never to walk in anyone's shadows…

“No matter what they take from me

“They can't take away my dignity…

And, of course, we misstated the didactic content and lyrical focus of “The Greatest Love of All” in that it constitutes the antithesis of the moral and political content of the Council of State. This beautiful song is therefore everything the Council of State is not. Dignity is what the Council of State lacks. It turns out that the national constitutional has taken that, dignity, away from it long before it assumed any sense of a ceremonial body in material existence—in the Ghanaian body politic.

And yes, Akufo-Addo spoke at the investiture of the Council of State with a forked tongue, because he was merely following the entrenched genealogy of Ghana’s post-factual politics. Bootlickers he actually wanted members of the Council of State to be, which these men and women already were and in fact are by virtue of their Ghanaian-ness and political patronage.

Preaching to the choir is Akufo-Addo’s forte.

The man is a political snake, a chameleonic hyena.

This man is a closet socialist, a closet social democrat, yet also a fawning proponent of property-owning democracy!

A political Dung Beetle, who weds the non-functioning social democracy of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) to the non-functioning property-owning democracy of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), both political philosophies merely a crushing symptomatology of a diseased carcass.

The cheek of it!

Ghanaian politics and politicians cannot do without bootlicking.

As bootlicking is wired into the sinews of the Ghanaian mind. Here are some notable examples:

Akufo-Addo reported “Yen Akanfuo” and All-Die-Be-Die!

Kennedy Agyapong’s reported “Akans should massacre Ewes and Gas.”

Monti 3’s reported threat to “kill and rape judges.”

Naaba Abdulai reported “I kill people every day.”

Ghanaian men sticking their dirty toes in the vagina of a suspected thief in a fit of jungle justice…

Akufo-Addo’s Invicible Forces on a wild goose chase in flagrant violation of the rule of law, of due process…

Those like the vigilante members of the Invicible Forces, Kennedy Agyapong, Monti 3, Naaba Abdulai…who succeed in breaking the wall of silence, the culture of silence, are barrels of open-defecation, attention-seeking tomfools.

These barrels of open-defecation mouthpieces cannot penetrate the walls built around the galamsey-induced pollution that threatens the very existence of flora and fauna, rivers, homes, agricultural lands, the future of unborn generations?

Nor overturn the so-called Ghana Hybrid System (GHS) which has been robbing Ghanaians of their gas and oil?

What happened to the so-called Production Sharing Agreement (PSA)?

Oh no!

How can the Orwellian sycophancy of Ghanaians make them that wicked, cold wicked?

Yet the mental constipation of our unpatriotic politicians has everything to do with it, the present state of grinding helplessness.

CLOSING REMARKS

Ghanaian clerics of all different faiths know how best to sell Yolanda Adam’s “The Battle is the Lord’s” to our power-hungry politicians, and yet once these self-seeking politicians convert this spiritual battle into one of electoral success, they quickly alchemize the sloganeering mantra “the Lord’s Battle” into an enticing pillar of political mammomism, exclusively for their personal enrichment and the enrichment of their cronies and family members.

Thus Ghana and Africa in general deserve a second revolution to complement Nkrumah’s. The second revolution is a moral, intellectual, industrial, spiritual, technological, scientific, and intellectual revolution.

Part of this revolutionary framework is what the eminent scholar, philosopher, and author Dr. Molefi Kete Asante calls one of his influential texts, “Revolutionary Pedagogy: Primer for Teachers of Black Children.”

Dr. Kofi Kissi Dompere also takes up a broader exegetical perspective on these questions in his scientific, mathematical and philosophical texts, “The Theory of Categorial Conversion: Rational Foundations of Nkrumaism” and “The Theory of Philosophical Consciencism: Practice Foundations of Nkrumaism,” both of which we have summarily profiled for our teeming readership.

Sad that our post-Nkrumah leaders have progressively turned Ghana’s public education into mental prisons for the vast majority of the youth. We therefore need the sort of progressive education and mental transformation that will eliminate the cancer of ignorance and the yoke of political and religious dictatorship from the Ghanaian body politic, while simultaneously putting the likes of Bishop Obinim, Montie 3, Naaba Abdulai, and Kennedy Agyapong in their place.

Max Romeo calls “the church” a “den of thieves” while Mutabaruka’s “The People’s Court 1” and “The People’s Court 2” promise to deal ruthlessly with those politicians and religious proselytizers who do not have the interests of black people at heart, enemies of the African world.

What we need at this moment is converting the pointed lyricism of these great songs into serious political and moral action.

We shall return with Part 2, the concluding segment.