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

As long as politically motivated cynics like Mr. Kwesi Ahwoi are placed in powerful cabinet portfolios like the Interior Ministry, Ghana will continue to regress beyond the dignified pale of history and civilization. At a first-quarter Conference of Directors and Regional Commanders of the Ghana National Fire and Rescue Service (GNFRS), Mr. Ahwoi was reported to have rather primitively and vacuously faulted some purportedly unidentifiable arsonists for the recent rash of market fires that ravaged several urban municipalities in the country (See "Interior Minister Blames Poor Intelligence for Market Fires" Graphic Online 4/4/14).

"We [the cabinet members of the Mahama-led government of the National Democratic Congress] strongly believe that there are unseen hands, but we are unable to catch them because the intelligence system is weak. I am also wondering whether our intelligence system hasn't collapsed," Mr. Ahwoi reportedly told the conferees. As to precisely who caused the remarkable weakening of our national system of intelligence, the former Minister of Agriculture would not say.

He further observed that "in Europe and America, intelligence officers were deployed to crime spots and some of the officers posed as mad men" in order to gather reliable intelligence for the tracking down, apprehension and prosecution of criminal suspects.

Maybe somebody ought to apprise Mr. Ahwoi of the fact that it was the "revolutionary" advent of the founding-father of the so-called National Democratic Congress, the former Chairman Jerry John Rawlings, in 1979 and 1981 and, again, in 1992 that witnessed the historically unprecedented torching of our major commercial hubs around the country. And then also, it is equally significant to observe that Mr. Ahwoi has been a key player and staunch supporter of all these three regimes. And so he cannot pretend not to be in the know about the architects of the present high spate of market fires.

It is also quite amusing, today, to hear Mr. Rawlings claim that his two "revolutions" were squarely aimed at stamping out abject corruption in the country. Needless to say, what is almost invariably and conveniently left out of the telling of the largely sanitized history of June 4th and December 31st, is the fact that these two "revolutionary" coups detat were equally indisputably about the economically destructive, albeit grossly misguided, Jihad against the hardworking and resourceful Ghanaian market woman.

Indeed, what we need to be telling our children and grandchildren is the inescapable, and incontrovertible, fact that the first port of "revolutionary call" by Mr. Rawlings and his fellow khakii-wearing comrades-in-arms was the Makola (Central) Market in Accra. The latter would be thoroughly razed to ashes by a systematically and deliberately orchestrated conflagration instigated and recklessly and wantonly executed by the so-called Junior Jesus, in the dubious name of a "house-cleaning exercise" against graft and corruption.

In other words, Mr. Ahwoi need not look beyond the membership of his own National Democratic Congress for the most reliable answers and solutions to the raging market fires. But that the problem may very well be largely technical and/or technological and architectural, on the one hand, and one having to do with the abjectly poor cultural habits of the market women, and men, themselves, on the other, as professionally and insightfully adumbrated by Brigadier-General John Bosco Guyiri, the Acting Chief Fire Officer of the Ghana National Fire and Rescue Service (GNFRS), clearly appears to be the last thing on the mind of the Interior Minister.

And on the latter score, it goes without saying that Mr. Ahwoi eerily appears to be morbidly afflicted with what might be aptly termed as "The Kulungugu Syndrome," in lieu of rationally finding a more scientifically and objectively sensible, and constructive, approach to dealing with the perennial rash of market fires. And that "Kulungugu Syndrome," of course, goes as follows: Place one or two card-carrying members of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) at the scene of a suspicious market fire and, Bingo!, the riddle has been resolved. How dumb of Mr. Ahwoi.

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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
April 4, 2014
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
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