By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

I really don’t want to believe that a very intelligent elderly statesman like Mr. Sam Okudjeto could stoop so low as to admonish lame-duck President John Dramani Mahama to use part of his final State of the Nation Address, scheduled for Thursday, January 5, to apologize to former President Jerry John Rawlings for supposedly alienating the latter for most of the past four years (See “Mahama Must Apologize to Rawlings – Okudzeto [sic]” Classfmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 1/4/17).

Has an apology become so cheap during the three decades that yours truly has resided outside the country? Or is it just that more likely, the very high-culture concept of an apology has totally lost any shade of meaning in the country that Chairman Rawlings and his clansmen and cronies spent some twenty-odd years culturally and economically dismantling?

First of all, anybody who has studiously followed the political relationship between Chairman Rawlings and his former protégé and Communications Minister, fully well knows that it is rather Mr. Rawlings who needs to apologize for scandalously using his wife and partner-in-crime, Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings, to perennially, incessantly, systematically and relentlessly discredit and malign Mr. Mahama ever since the late President John Evans Atta-Mills, the Candidate Mills, selected the former as his running-mate.

Back in 2007, or thereabouts, the first gut reaction of the Rawlingses was for Nana Konadu to angrily announce to the world that “Gonja John” was the least qualified candidate to partner the three-time flagbearer of the National Democratic Congress. “John Mahama cannot be trusted,” railed Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings. She would go on to imperiously add, “My husband has not approved of John Mahama’s nomination, and so it cannot be said to be final.”

Let Mr. Okudjeto look Ghanaians straight in the eye and tell us whether the preceding words and the attitude of the Rawlingses were endearing enough for the former Chief Shit-Bomber to have cozied up to the Bloody Couple.

Of course, it would shortly turn out that Chairman Rawlings had expected his pet political poodle, in the words of the ardent opponents of the former Legon tax-law professor, to select Ghana’s longest-reigning First Lady as his running-mate. The Bloody Couple would also attend the party’s 2010 congressional primary in Sunyani, the Brong-Ahafo regional capital, with the sole objective of unseating the then-incumbent President Mills, so as to enable these cold-calculating criminal abductors and killers of Supreme Court judges to continue with their bloody “revolutionary” agenda of “housecleaning.”

And, of all wonders, it is this irredeemably reprobate Ghanaian strongman that Mr. Okudjeto would have Little Dramani salute before the august House of the country’s Parliament as an emulative model of decorum and moral decency. Just out of curiosity: Are Messrs. Okudjeto and Rawlings related by blood? No pun is intended here, of course.

Make no mistake, dear reader, I am absolutely no fan of John Mahama’s; but I have, nonetheless, painfully watched in a daze during the past four years, as Chairman Rawlings and his politically star-crossed wife stridently lambasted Little Dramani by calling his person and government every unprintable name in the book, and then, literally, throwing the kitchen sink at the former National Democratic Congress’ Member of Parliament for Gonja-West. And yet, the respected former President of the Ghana Bar Association (GBA) would have progressive-minded Ghanaian citizens like yours truly believe that it was all Little Dramani’s fault!

Well, I could perfectly dig that portion of his Joy-Fm interview in which Mr. Okudjeto called on Mr. Mahama to apologize to the nation or his countrymen and women because as President, Little Dramani must have wronged quite a legion of Ghanaian citizens. I mean, I find the idea of anybody apologizing to Chairman Rawlings inescapably oxymoronic. But to genuflect before the damn godforsaken Togbui Avaklasu, I, merely because the half-Scottish waif is the founder of the nation-wrecking political juggernaut that is the National Democratic Congress simply chokes my imagination.

At any rate, if I may politely ask: Do single individuals found political parties all by themselves where Mr. Okudjeto comes from in Ghana? Apologize to Rawlings? Tweakai!