Papa Kwesi Nduom Should Not Insult My Land-Tilling Kinsmen and Women

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

That old, beautiful song has its theme directed at tattletales. It is called “Gossip, Gossip Evil Thing” and counsels tattletales not to talk at all, if they have nothing nice to tell about their associates and neighbors to their listeners and/or audience. As I read Dr. Papa Kwesi Nduom’s message of felicitations to the Ghanaian farmer on Farmers’ Day 2011, I had the same feeling of scorn and disappointment (See “Farmers and Fishermen of Ghana Deserve Better Than This!” Modernghana.com 12/2/11).

I felt great disdain, anger and disappointment because under the specious guise of pleading the cause of both farmers and fishermen, the lately besieged 2008 presidential candidate of the rump-Convention People’s Party used the entire six, or seven, paragraphs of his congratulatory message to exclusively plead the cause of his “fellow coastal kin and clansmen” at the expense of the “non-coastal” kin and clansmen and women of mine who produce more than 80-percent of the country’s dietary needs and resources on land, underneath the leaves (or “Ahabanmu”), rather than from the ocean-sea, as it were.

Dr. Nduom’s entire anti-government tirade regarded the need to make pre-mix fuel abundant and readily available to coastal fishermen, discourage pair-trawling and make sure to enrich those who harvest fishery resources – or sea food – where they have not cultivated the same, in order that their children may not be prematurely forced to leave school. Dr. Nduom also obliquely and sarcastically decried the fact that the country’s new-found oil and gas industry, largely offshore, may be polluting our ocean beds, thus rendering the livelihood of these already stressed fishermen even more prohibitive.

Not even once did the former Member of Parliament for Komenda-Edina-Egu afo-Abirem (KEEA) call for an immediate halt to Galamsey, or illegal mining activity, that has equally been making farming extremely difficult for Ghanaian food producers; and also, the fact that like their fishermen-folk, not being adequately resourced has meant the offspring and young wards and relatives of these tillers/tenders of the land are also routinely forced to quit school and work at back-breaking jobs to fill the dining tables and food-storage closets of “coastal denizens” like Papa Kwesi Nduom with plantains, yams, cocoyams, cassava, groundnuts, poultry and red meat, and rice.

Indeed, as I read his rather piteous mockery of a felicitation, I couldn’t also help wondering why a separate day has not already been earmarked for the celebration of the admittedly yeomanly activities of our nation’s fishermen (and fisherwomen, too!) I also began to fully and angrily appreciate the reason why Dr. Nduom has lately been catching a lot of flak for allegedly being opportunistic and morbidly divisive.

I also firmly believe that the so-called Adwumawura, Creator of Jobs, does not deserve half of the national attention that he has been lately getting from the media, especially where the focus of his politics has witnessed him mordantly carp the government of his own homeboy for purportedly shortchanging the poor and trodden upon. This is because rather than put his considerable weight behind the far more constructive and progressive agenda of the now-opposition New Patriotic Party, in whose cabinet he had served for some six years, in the lead-up to Election 2008, when it became starkly clear that his personal fortunes on the national political scene were not adequate to put him in Mr. Kofi Antubam’s Chair, the incurably mischievous Dr. Nduom decided to feign neutrality in another scandalous metaphorical case of invidiously pitting his “coastal fisher kinsfolk” against the humble and earth-bitten rustic farmers of “Ahabanmu.”

Yes, our farmers and fishermen deserve far better than what Messrs. Mills and Mahama have been visiting upon their pates. Still, one needs to be extremely cautious when Papa Kwesi Nduom emerges out of the proverbial wood-work to exuberantly push such agenda. Then, of course, the primary beneficiary of such special pleading could be none other than, you guessed right, Edina Kwesi.

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is Director of The Sintim-Aboagye Center for Politics and Culture and author of “Ghanaian Politics Today” (Lulu.com, 2008). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net. ###