Opinions of Monday, 13 April 2015

Columnist: Yawose, John

Murtala Muhammed, the pompous, the chauvinist, the ethnocentric braggart

Murtala Muhammed the MP for Nantong and Deputy Minister of Trade is in the news for the unpleasant reasons. He has exhibited damnable characteristics he has been perennially accusing others of, especially the minority NPP members and specifically Ashantis. As the adage goes, 'the leopard can never change its spots' and the Nantong MP has lived up squarely to it. He can ride he can't hide. His intrinsic pomposity has been exposed badly. I will explain.

Before his nasty outbursts last week, I have observed this MP and it has been confirmed by persons who know him from childhood that he is a man too full of himself; exactly how he has described NPP members all along. In political commentaries on TV and radio, he has appeared to me, out and out, as a bitter person harbouring vindictive ideas about some imagined condition that Ashantis don't regard Northerners. As a result he has lumped all NPP members as sworn enemies of Northerners and proceed to find ways to pick quarrels with his political opponents on minor and petty issues bordering on that imagined NPP chauvinistic tendencies, to give him opportunity to vent his spleen and boiled up anger and sensitivities on them.
Some cases in point are the unwarranted confrontations he had with Mrs Ursula Owusu Eduful and Dr. Osei Akoto, the MPs for Ablekuma South and Kwadaso respectively on TV discussions, in the run-up to 2012 elections. Study him well. He is so irritable and sensitive and picks quarrels here and there on issues NPP raise in an attempt to prove that NPP members discriminate against Northerners. HE IS NOT HAPPY WHEN AKANS REFER TO NORTHERNERS AS 'PEPEFUO' BUT HE IS HAPPY REFERING TO AKANS AS 'KABONGA'. He has been told several times that, 'pepefuo' is not an insult. It is just a language; how Akans refer to Northerners, but the guy is still very bitter.

Murtala started all that gibberishly baseless and ethnocentric charge in the political spectrum that NPP members did not like John Mahama as President of Ghana because he is a Northerner 'Pepeni' and that was why Akufo Ado, the 'Kabonga' NPP presidential candidate took him (Mahama) on, in court in the 2012 Presidential election challenge. I dare say that Murtala started all those boloney provocations on TV, which has run on even till today.

I go on. Murtala Muhammed has been arrogant and haughty from day one. He has shown ethnocentric tendencies in several of his submissions on TV. He has had some age long hatred for Ashantis especially and this seems to have eaten him up. Murtala behaviour shows, he seems to think that he has arrived in the political horizon as the modern David to challenge anything Ashanti and liberate 'suppressed' Northerners. In this illusionary spectrum, howbeit, dangerous and treacherous mind-set, he has founded his political career. Murtala, the phantom Northern champion is full of vindictive and chauvinistic tendencies to the extent that he is now extending the fight to his own people. He has been caught in his own web of characteristics he constantly accuses others of. He is a dictator. He is big-headed. He feels superior. He does not know humbleness. He proved all these at a go last week.

Listen to Murtala Muhammed: - 'I am a chauvinistic-----When I begin to speak out, let no hypocrite stop me...It is pathetic, absolutely pathetic: is unethical, is so funny, is so stupid, is so silly, is nasty, is un-Islamic for people the same party to be sitting down and their intention is about how they can get someone out of Parliament. ----they should not underestimate the consequences of my actions. And no one; no Malam or chief should dare call me when I begin to speak out.--"People are so subsumed that people come and give them filthy money, ill-gotten money and they will shut up --- I have nothing to lose if I decide to go on the rampage -----''

Furthermore, still sounding egotistical, he boasted about his impeccable academic records in a disrespectful, insulting and in a damnably discourteous manner. After all, so Murtala Muhammed who seems to have aggressively repugnant positions accusing opponents and tribes of not being humble does not know humbleness, humility and self-effacement, even as a youth leader with prospects to go places in the nation, in future. What a world. Murtala must purge himself out of his unbridled conceited culture.
Murtala Muhammed has been clearly exposed in this tirade as having been always seeing things from a inferiority complex position thus his aggressiveness to depict NPP as exhibiting superiority tendencies were actually founded on his own envious, malicious and inferiority complex physiognomies. Shame onto Murtala Muhammed!

I have warned him several times to take it easy and show some humility in his commentaries and political discourses but alas, the guy is fixed in his bad ways: splashing rotten eggs, making spiteful remarks and doing cynical laughs, bellttlings –all at political opponents during discussions. This time he has done it to his own party personalities. Dog is eating dogs. The Northern gods want to destroy Murtala Muhammed. He must first be made mad indeed.

(Grapevine sources have it that; Murtala Muhammed, Fuseini Inusa and Haruna Iddrisu the Tamale North and South MPs and Ministers of Employment and Roads and Highways respectively, who are all young persons are competing for future Northern NDC political leadership, which is the origin of this feud)
John Yawose