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

In June 1979, when he first shot his way into the seat of power and governance, I was in secondary form three. Two years later, having handed over a ramshackle economy to Dr. Hilla Limann and his People’s National Party (PNP), the half-Scottish urchin reprised his forcible assumption of the seat of governance with wanton accusations of abject corruption and gross economic mismanagement against Dr. Limann.
Interestingly, however, the Sorbonne- and London-educated deposed premier would never be brought before any legitimately constituted court of law. Nonetheless, for some curious reason, many Ghanaians seemed to have readily accepted then Flt.-Lt. Jerry John Rawlings’ patently baseless accusations against, in retrospect, his intellectual and managerial superior.
And while most of his ardent supporters have since sobered up and even, in some significant cases, repented of their sanguinary and outright criminal ways, Mr. Rawlings continues to behave almost as if the country and its people have simply been marking time and, thus, perpetually doomed to take marching orders from the former professionally ossified Ghana Air Force pilot.
And he has not been totally wrong in his assumptions and presumptions. Else, how could this cognitively incoherent excuse for disciplined leadership have had the likes of Messrs. Kwesi Botchway, John Evans Atta-Mills, Obed Yao Asamoah and Kofi Nyidevu Awoonor follow him for two decades, even as Mr. Rawlings literally emptied our national coffers, became overweight and conversely ran our national economy aground?
And to cynically justify his wanton looting of state property, mischievously disguised as “progressive divestiture,” this ever-screaming pseudo-socialist has shamelessly resorted to falsely accusing his political opponents of the very misdeeds of which he is, himself, the most guilty of all Ghanaian leaders!
We have known all along, for instance, how Dzelukope (or is it Sogakope?) Jeremiah and his ever-scheming conjugal partner-in-crime, Nana Konadu Agyeman, have used organizations established and purportedly controlled by the National Democratic Congress (NDC), such as the December 31st Women’s Movement (DWM), to plunder state property, such as the Nsawam Cannery.
The bloody couple have also been alleged by media sources to have used these same organizations to secure private investment capital for a cocoa-processing plant that they either acquired or built in the Tema district of the Greater-Accra Region.
What makes the preceding acts of shameless greed roundly insufferable is that the bloody couple have spent most of their time in the political limelight and at the helm of power summarily demonizing their political opponents as well as diligent and law-abiding Ghanaians whose wealth and legitimately acquired property they envied, having them proscribed and executed both overtly and covertly on the basis of forensically untenable charges. And where the victims were lucky to escape with their lives, they were rendered destitute and made the butts of wicked jokes and prime grist for obloquy.
It is also significant to observe, and we have done the same in past writings, that having imperiously and illegitimately ousted the Limann government, for supposedly collaborating with the Bretton Woods institutions and Western imperialist powers to bleed Ghana raw, Mr. Rawlings would shamelessly consort with the same institutions under the dubious guise of a Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) to brutally and literally put a hitherto robust and budding national economy into receivership. Today, Ghana’s most brutal dictator is quick to take undue credit for the democratic culture of Ghana’s Fourth Republic.
Strangely though, this same self-righteous “revolutionary” with the crusading mantra of “Probity and Accountability” continues to hide behind an Indemnity Clause, specially inserted into the Fourth-Republican Constitution, to thumb his nose at his political opponents and disappointed former disciples alike.
The irony of reality, though, is that his former chief acolyte and now substantive president of Ghana, John Evans Atta-Mills, in attempting to secure substantial investment capital from the Bretton Woods establishment, a little over a year ago, had absolutely no choice but to highlight the phenomenal achievements of the Kufuor-led New Patriotic Party (NPP). And so it is rather amusing that Mr. Rawlings and his politically ambitious wife should be impugning the managerial credibility of the very opposition party on whose solid record of performance and achievement NDC finance minister Kwabena Dufuor heavily depended to sell Ghana to the IMF and the World Bank (See “NPP Statement In Response To Rawlings And Wife” Ghanaweb.com 11/3/10).
Needless to say, one cannot but be unreservedly encouraged by NPP General-Secretary Kwadwo Owusu-Afriyie’s cautionary note to the bloody couple, to the following effect: “As for Rawlings, he gunned his way to political power and ruled this country for nineteen years. In the process many innocent people were killed, many innocent people were maimed, and many more suffered unimaginable pain. Today, the same Rawlings family is seeking to rule this country one more time. A Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings presidency is a weird and unreasonable proposition. But if they want to pursue such a bizarre ambition, let them go ahead. What they should not do is attempt to distort the respectable record of the New Patriotic Party. They will always get a fitting response.”
And to the foregoing, of course, one can only respond “Amen!”

*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 a Governing Board Member of the Accra-based Danquah Institute (DI) and the author of a just-published volume of poetry titled “The Obama Serenades” (Atumpan Publications/Lulu.com, 2011). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net.
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