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

If, indeed, it is true that former President Jerry John Rawlings stated at the just-concluded Delegates’ Congress of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) that those, like himself, who traipsed the length and breadth of the country in the run-up to Election 2008, calling Nana Akufo-Addo oafish names like “That dwarf, what is his name?” are actually the “soldiers” who won elective power for the NDC, then Ghanaians had better watch out to ensure that the Rawlings-Mahama-Arthur posse, this time around, does not insult their intelligence once again (See “I Agree with Rawlings; Nobody Will Work for Another to Enjoy – Afriyie Ankrah” MyJoyOnline.com 8/1/12).

I have spoken and written about it several times before, that the then main opposition National Democratic Congress was able to narrowly defeat the presidential candidate of the then-ruling New Patriotic Party, because the top leadership of the Elephant Party had not emotionally wised up enough to fully appreciate the glaring fact that Election 2008 was far, far less a hectic contest of personalities than one between competing ideologies and the imperative need for Ghanaians not to be returned to the wilderness of abject deprivation, depravity and the misery into which Mr. Rawlings and his opportunistic hangers-on had plunged the nation for some twenty protracted years.

And to be certain, most successful middle-class Ghanaians who continue to lean towards the NDC, including several of my own relatives and friends, are quick to almost wistfully confess to any progressive-minded Ghanaian willing to listen, that they continue to do so because it was during the tenure of Mr. Rawlings, when tribalism reigned supreme, that they were, paradoxically, able to secure scholarship awards to study abroad. Somehow, the NDC apparatchiks have been so successful in brainwashing, as well as erasing the collective long-term memory of a remarkable percentage of otherwise reasonably educated Ghanaians into fatuously and fanatically buying into the criminal mythology that, indeed, it was Mr. Rawlings and his so-called governments of the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) and the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) that invented the very noble concepts of “equity,” “probity,” “accountability” and “justice” on the postcolonial Ghanaian political landscape.

At any rate, it is rather facile and scandalously naïve for anybody to suggest that campaign platform-hopping and the rank trading of abusive obscenities are the main ingredients of winsome electioneering. In the best of democracies, it is a party and/or an individual politician’s track-record of sterling leadership performance that differentiates a winner from a loser. The latter, of course, is not to imply that savvy campaign strategizing is not integral to the equation.

The indisputable reality is that every successful electioneering campaign is almost predominantly determined by the sort of “air-conditioned” brainwork which one can only expect Messrs. Jerry Rawlings and Elvis Afriyie-Ankrah, the deputy local government minister, to be able to marginally fathom. What was also rather quaint and embarrassing about Mr. Rawlings’ appearance at the Kumasi congress of the NDC, has to do with the man’s predictable and near-pathological lack of any sense of shame of the sort that is routinely associated with well-bred Ghanaians.

Earlier on, we had been lied to, again, by Togbui Avaklasu’s own spokesman, Mr. Kofi Adams, that widespread rumors hinting at the estranged NDC founder’s appearance and active participation in the proceedings of the Kumasi delegates’ congress were all a hoax. Once again, we hope Ghanaian voters are studiously taking cognizance of the fact that the choice of leadership going into Election 2012, is between self deluded “young” liars , on the one hand, and mature and administratively creative and competent and yes, “property-owning” and democracy-loving statesmen and women, on the other.

*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 “Dr. J. B. Danquah: Architect of Modern Ghana” (iUniverse.com, 2005). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net. ###