You may not like the man, but there is one thing that you cannot fairly begrudge him. The fact is that John Henry Mensah may, arguably, be the smartest Ghanaian statesman alive. Like the proverbial duiker – or antelope – of that classic song by Mr. Jerry Hansen and his Ramblers’ International band, Mr. Mensah’s lambent wit on almost any critical issue that he sets his mind to is beyond contest. And I make the foregoing observation without any fear of contradiction, whatsoever.
The fact that he is also of the same age as my late father makes me envisage the man, at least vicariously, as some sort of surrogate father, politically speaking, that is.
Long before I got to know him intimately, intellectually speaking, that is, for I have never personally met the man, or maybe I have but did not recognize him – perhaps in the hustle and bustle of New York City’s Manhattan streets, or even Accra’s – I had heard and read about him as a bulwark of Development Economics (or is it Economic Development?) I had heard of him having significantly facilitated the post-war economic development of a major Western-European country. I believe, if memory serves me right, the country is called The Netherlands, otherwise known as Holland. For quite awhile, as I was growing up, I would vehemently argue with my playmates by insisting that a citizen of Holland was called “Hollish,” not a “Hollander” or “Dutch,” for “Hollish” appeared to rhyme with “British” in my quite flighty poetic imagination. And so I kept to “Hollish,” a name which I had personally invented and which, for that matter, made me feel quite powerful, until I started being marked wrong by my Geography and Current Affairs teachers. And now that I find myself recalling the fact that a Ghanaian cabinet minister – she was a deputy then – recently introduced September 31 onto our country’s fiscal (or is it political?) calendar, I realize, in retrospect, that in fourth grade, I wasn’t, after all, the veritable klutz that I secretly suspected that I might be.
I harbor an indefeasible filial affection for Mr. Mensah, Finance Minister extraordinaire under Dr. K. A. Busia’s Progress Party (PP), because had Ghana possessed just ten J. H. Mensahs, Mr. Rawlings would not be priggishly running about pretending to be a political Mike Tyson; he also would have had to chomp off the ears of Evander Hollyfield and then rappelled himself across the Scottish Highlands in a jiffy.
In the late 1990s, I was so epically peeved when Mr. Mensah was arrested by the U. S. Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), for “legitimately” attempting to export some crackerjack munitions to bust the snotty behinds of a stray mule who presumed to have “democratized the guns,” by keeping Ghana’s public arsenal among the ranks of his tribal clique of psychopaths, kleptocrats and terrorists. Indeed, Professor Mawusi Dake related the preceding narrative in a far more eloquent fashion than yours truly could ever hope to do. And so, in due course, we shall regale our dear readers with the same.
Yes, I was disconsolately peeved when a purportedly erudite tribal snitch, who calls himself first and foremost a poet laureate of his own people before the rest of the Ghanaian citizenry, caused Mr. Mensah to be busted in New Jersey. But, of course, since Mr. Mensah was no guttersnipe, but an astute gentleman in a classy three-piece Giorgio Armani suit and a pair of Gucci hoofs, as it were, they let him go. For, cowboys and all, make no mistake, the United States of America is about far much, much more than Texas and Iraq. America is also about Wall Street and Hollywood and Las Vegas and Ivy Leaguers. And, needless to say, Mr. Mensah belongs smack-dab in the latter realm.
Actually, they let Mr. Mensah off the hook, as it were, because a very brilliant Ghanaian resident who was put before the bright lights of mainstream American television had the remarkable presence of mind to remind the U. S. Government and the American public that the self-righteous Pontiff of the so-called Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) was a veritable assassin of Ghana’s judicial system and an insufferable enemy of democracy; in effect, an outlaw who deserved the sympathy of none other than General Lucifer himself!
And so they let him go scot-free, who is no mean Scottish mongrel, and bare-fisted, which was an egregious error, as soon Comrade Joe-Jato’s apocalyptic pronouncements on the eternal demise of Ghanaian democracy made it definitively clear to his American captors that at the very moment that he was let go, Mr. Mensah also ought to have been given at least one nuclear warhead to promptly cauterize the malignant, cancerous tumor that continues to plague and torment innocent and unsuspecting Ghanaians well into the Twenty-First century.
And so when Mr. Mensah talks about rallying the Ghana Government behind the inviolable sovereignty rights of Southern Sudan, the man knows exactly what he is talking about. But even more significantly, yours truly would add Darfur onto the list of those that must be unconditionally freed. For the war in the Sudan is about much, much more than geographical, or even geopolitical, enclaves. The “civil” war raging in the Sudan is ineluctably and incontrovertibly about RACE. And in terms of the history of that sacred land, even as all other lands are equally sacred, the ethnic Arabs have no legitimate claim, whatsoever, besides the criminal collaborative application of brute force. And on the latter score, of course, the allusion is squarely to the recent colonial history of the Sudan.
Interestingly, the Sudanese Question is more about the collective impotence, or outright cowardliness, of autochthonous - or indigenous – Africans. Which is why even many Black-African Muslims would rather pester their governments with annual “vanity” pilgrimages to Mecca, and Medina, than boldly and courageously demand swift and certain justice for the geopolitically cannibalized and dehumanized most of whom, at least in the opprobrious case of Darfur, are also “Brother- and Sister-Muslims.”
In short, an African Union without a definitive settlement of the Darfurian/Southern Sudanese Question is, of course, only the paradisiacal dream of an idiot.
Views expressed by the author(s) do not necessarily reflect those of GhanaHomePage.
