By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
August 11, 2014
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

His name is Alhaji Katonga, and he is described as Zongo Youth Leader of the Berekum, Brong-Ahafo, branch of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC). His name doesn't sound like one who has deep ancestral roots in this township in which two of my elder siblings were born. Of course, his zongo residency readily gives that away. But he is apparently a responsible citizen in good standing, which is why he holds such a quite influential position in his community.

But maybe somebody more mature and levelheaded ought to remind Mr. Katonga that about the only period in the life and history of the NDC when the party came as close to the heart of Chairman Jerry John Rawlings as the founding patriarch's own wife, and staunch and steady partner in crime, was during the 8-year period between 1992 and 2000, when the former extortionate and longest-reigning Ghanaian dictator suavely and expediently morphed into a popularly elected civilian president.

But even back then, the pecking order in the Rawlings family was configured as follows - the Chairman, Nana Konadu, their daughters and son, the family dog and, you guessed it, the National Democratic Congress. You see, when Nana Konadu calls the entire leadership of the NDC minus her own "My Dear" a pathological pack of hoodlums, she has the full-backing of Chairman Rawlings. She does because the original objective of founding the National Democratic Congress was with the understanding that at the end of the 20-year tyranny of Togbui Avaklasu I, his royal Asante princess was to ascend the Sogakope Mafia Throne and rule for at least another ten years. That was what the entire 2010 NDC's Sunyani Congress was all about.

You see, with the bloody couple, politics is all about positional changes in the bedroom. In short, after lying on top for two protracted decades while Konadu delivered their babies, it was time to jazz up the entire Lambada (or belly-dancing) suite with the Chairman lying supine, labor-ward fashion, while the glorified hermaphrodite tested his/her manhood, depending on how one envisages matters.

In other words, it is at once both unpardonably naive and preposterous for Alhaji Katongo to presume politics to have any significant edge in the relationship between the rheumatoid Konadu and the schizophrenic Jerry - indeed, he may well be torn between his personal demons and something else, but that something else is clearly not Konadu. Besides, even if divorce were to be on the conjugal agenda of the bloody couple, it just would simply not happen merely because some misguided lad with the very strange Un-Bono-Like name like Katongo would have it as such.

Don't get me wrong, my dear young man, the grizzled old bear is power drunk and incurably so; but he is not, and can never be really drunk enough to mistake the sullen abstraction that is the NDC party machine for the fist-sized boobs of a wizened sexagenarian woman two or so years his senior. I also don't know that either couple possesses any real, or credible, love for the eagle-eyed umbrella and the jumbo beak of the same bird, which sometimes I confuse with the aquiline nose of the half-Scottish waif.

No poetry is intended here, of course, for the life of apocalyptic savagery forged and doggedly pursued by the bloody couple defies the sensual pulchritude of a lyricist like yours truly. (See "Divorce Nana Konadu - Berekum Youth Tell Rawlings" Adom News 8/11/14).

________________________________________________________