By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Jan. 1, 2015
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

He can fool himself into believing in the "relevance" of the so-called 31st December Revolution, but those of us old enough to remember the bloody days of the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) junta and are not afraid of the unalloyed truth, can only bow our heads in shame and contritely acknowledge that there, in fact, existed no such thing as a 31st December Revolution, but rather a precipitous "devolution" (or rapid and massive degeneration) of Ghanaian moral and cultural values.

In a poignantly real sense, it was a classical case of the proverbial tail wagging the dog, rather than the other way around (See "31st December Revolution Relevant - Portuphy" Ghana News Agency / Ghanaweb.com 1/1/15). About the only relevance of the PNDC Reign-of-Terror is the need for Ghanaians to be eternally vigilant in order to ensure that this most tragic and inescapably embarrassing moment in our national history is not reprised. And it is inexcusably criminal for the newly elected Chairman of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), Mr. Kofi Portuphy, to claim that it was the practically and functionally false principles and tenets of December 31st that logically led to the birth of the 1992 Constitution.

To have a clearer perspective, one only needs to study Libya's so-called October Revolution, to which Chairman Jerry John Rawlings studiously look up to for inspiration and guidance. I know this for a fact because I was one of those scandalously naive teenage guinea-pigs of the Rawlings revolution who were vapidly fed Col. Muammar El-Gadhafy's Green Book. To this day, I don't remember a single intelligent or meaningful lesson that I learned from that largely erratic and discursively incoherent serialized pamphlets. I also fully appreciate why many an Arab ethnic chauvinist continues to live with the heretical myth of African clinical stupidity.

And sometimes, I even have a feeling that the half-Scottish Chairman Rawlings actually believes in the pathological and arrant stupidity of the proverbial average Ghanaian, thus his perennially persistent thumbing of his nose at us "full-blooded" Ghanaians, partly in the form of his provocative annual celebration of the 31st December Boko Haram-style devolution of Ghanaian ethos and mores.

Indeed, Chairman Rawlings revealed this much recently, when in criticizing Bishop Obinim's allegedly injurious approach to prophetic healing and deliverance, the man who extortionately dominated Ghana's political landscape for some two decades described his former captives as being so "scandalously gullible" that Ghanaians seemed to believe and were willing to readily lap up any ideological poppycock with which they were presented. No wonder Chairman Rawlings has been frantically scheming to have his wife accede to the presidency since 2011, when Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings was decisively trounced in the NDC presidential primary in the Brong-Ahafo capital of Sunyani.

And then just this past December, a rascally impenitent Chairman Rawlings, once again, attempted to foist the presidential candidacy of his Al-Qaeda-minded wife on party delegates, when he apologetically called for Nana Konadu, "Our Mother" (in the words of the bloody, old butcher himself), to be welcomed back into the vanguard ranks of the key operatives of the National Democratic Congress.

In lighting up the so-called Eternal Flame to mark the 33rd anniversary of the coup that toppled the democratically elected Limann-led government of the People's National Party (PNP), Mr. Portuphy was widely reported to have declared that the 31st December putsch that summarily eviscerated Ghana's constitutional democracy, otherwise known as the Third Republic, was worth celebrating because it infused the salutary "principles of probity and accountability," which had hitherto been sorely lacking, into Ghanaian political culture.

Well, Chairman Portuphy may do Ghanaians and himself a lot of good by explaining precisely how the Mahama-led National Democratic Congress government has studiously and organically incorporated these supposedly unique principles of the 31st December "Revolution" into his Better-Ghana Agenda.

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