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



It is highly unlikely that the late President John Evans Atta-Mills would be making the sorely unsavory habit of spookily appearing in the nightly dreams of his former communications director, if he was truly the much-touted "Asomdwoehene" (King-of-Peace) that his lackeys and hangers-on made him out to be (See "I Keep Seeing Mills In My Dreams; He Says He Is Happy - Koku Anyidoho" MyJoyOnline.com / Modernghana.com 7/23/13).



It is highly unlikely because even while he was alive, Mr. Anyidoho had not mustered the requisite courage and honesty to tell the eager Ghanaian public the truth about the late president's state of health. And so it is rather silly for Mr. Anyidoho to expect that any levelheaded Ghanaian citizen would place any premium remarkable on his so-called serial dreams about his former boss. I also don't know that any forward-looking Ghanaian goes to bed wondering as to whether the former Legon Law School professor is "doing well in his eternal rest."



The fact of the matter is that the man has died and been afforded the most lavish of Ghanaian funerals; enough send-off prayers have also been said in his memory. That ought to be the end of the matter already! Unless, of course, Mr. Anyidoho has something meaningful to add unto what most of us already know, the political comedian had better spare us such arrant poppycock as him having been more excruciatingly pained by the demise of President Mills than that of his own mother some twenty years ago.



Charity, goes the maxim, begins at home. If Mr. Anyidoho thinks that the passing of his own mother was far less traumatic and painful to him than that of President Mills - a total biological stranger - that ought to tell us more about the character of the serial dreamer himself, rather than anything worthwhile and/or meaningful about either Mr. Anyidoho's mother or the deceased president. Or perhaps the former Atta-Mills communication director finds it imperative to inform his countrymen and women that he had one of the worst forms of maternal nurturance growing up?



And then, also, to claim implicitly that his own father had been far less significant a presence in his life than President Mills, may very well explain Mr. Anyidoho's crass and abject disrespect for remarkable Ghanaian leaders like President John Agyekum-Kufuor, whom the cloudy-faced Mr. Anyidoho once described as facially unprepossessing or repugnant. I also don't know whom he has been talking to vis-a-vis the subject of President Mills' political significance and/or place in the annals of postcolonial Ghana, for Mr. Anyidoho to so brazenly claim that "When [President] Mills was alive, Ghanaians 'didn't value him,' [while] others 'pretended not to value him,' but everybody is now hailing him after his death."



Here again, the fact of the matter is that most Ghanaians are direly in search of the progressive leadership that President Mills woefully lacked and failed to provide them, and which President John Dramani Mahama palpably does not seem to be even half-capable of affording them.



And then also, as to whether the deceased president had been driven to the hospital in a car or an ambulance is decidedly a non-issue; Ghanaians have a right to be provided with a comprehensive coroner's report on what killed President Mills, not the clearly hazy and incoherent oneiric hallucinations of a man who may well be in dire need of psychiatric examination.



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

Department of English

Nassau Community College of SUNY

Garden City, New York

July 29, 2013

E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

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