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

When Mr. Kwaku Baako queries whether there is a God, in view of Mr. Rawlings’ annoying purveyance of half-truths and outright lies regarding his political track-record vis-à-vis those of his successors, he can only be rhetorical with his question, which is not actually a question, as such, but a reluctant admission of what Ghanaians have known all along. Which is that more than Mr. Rawlings’ erratic behavior prompting such seemingly inscrutable wonderment, it is the consistently vacillating stance of media fixtures like Mr. Baako that is to blame for the evidently interminable circus act that is Dzelukope Jeremiah.

In other words, my unabashed contention here is that the moment and day that witting or unwitting Rawlings promoters like Mr. Baako put the proverbial brakes on their quixotic attempts at inordinately and incessantly finding redeeming features of this most reprobate of national scoundrels, in the dubious name of journalistic objectivity, the presence of God, now grievously alienated from our proverbial neck of the woods, would be firmly, healthily and permanently established among us.

For now, God is better off sticking to his unquestionably hectic and protracted vacation schedule. I also deemed such theological query to be patently out of context in our rather bald and lackluster political arena. Still, it seemed to make perfect sense that Mr. Baako should raise the question of divine justice vis-à-vis the self-proclaimed revolutionary who has single-handedly, and also single-mindedly, caused the deaths of more unsuspecting and innocent Ghanaians than any other postcolonial leader.

More so because not quite long ago, it was widely reported in the national media that Mr. Baako had taken up the Islamic faith and even assumed a Muslim identity, which actually turned out to be only partial. He had simply prefixed “Malik” to his bona fide Akan-Ghanaian name. And then shortly thereafter, I saw a photograph of the editor-publisher of the Crusading Guide with a woman in a Muslim veil who was captioned as his “newly-acquired” bride.

And then it began to make quite a heck of a lot of sense to me that a fifty-something-year-old Mr. Baako would, indeed, opt for the Muslim religion. But, of course, I also wondered why such a reasonably intelligent man would piggyback on a Ghanaian Christian education, only to abruptly cede all the credit to Islam. Did Mr. Bin Laden have anything to do with all this? I wondered and not seeming to readily find any satisfactory answer to my question, simply shrugged my shoulders and decided that whoever thought the best way into a man’s heart was a well-kept kitchen cabinet, stove and refrigerator must definitely not have known Mr. Baako.

On a personal note, I must say that I have quite a great respect for Mr. Baako, particularly when it comes to his dogged journalistic pursuit of whatever he deems to be truth and objectivity. For my part, however, inasmuch as Mr. Baako is entitled to his own peculiar brand of objectivity, nonetheless, dirty and immitigably brutal political con-artists and bullies like Mr. Rawlings and the Tsikatas, particularly Kojo and Tsatsu, have absolutely no right to charitable and/or sympathetic media portrayal. Which is why in the past when he had suggested via E-mail that we hold forth on one of the current affairs programs in the country, I had promptly demurred, more on grounds of not being unduly drawn into the interminable vortex of political tail-chasing than whether the subject of discourse had mainstay or mileage, as it were.
In a news item captioned “Is There a God? – Kwaku Baako” (Ghanaweb.com 11/3/10), the Dzelukope Schoolyard Bully is reported to have made the following decidedly mordant accusation against the very personality that he doggedly imposed on Ghanaian citizens: “The Mills administration, Rawlings noted, is not doing any better in alleviating the unemployment situation in the country, saying [that] the situation has worsened. So worse (sic) [in fact] that the word ‘pain’ is now the official response to greetings in northern Ghana.”
Well, what the reporter of the foregoing quote ought to be reminding his/her readers is the fact that the credibility of the man who would also have his wife assume his former job description is inextricably implicated in the performance quality, or lack thereof, of the Mills-Mahama administration. For eight years, Mr. Rawlings kept insisting to the NDC constabulary and the Ghanaian electorate at large that the then-Candidate Atta-Mills was the man best qualified to assume our national reins of governance.
And so what does the foregoing tell us about the psyche of Jato Dzelukope? Anyway, the foregoing accusation is quite mordant because it offers prime grist to the opponents of President Mills, some Election 2012. I can, for instance, readily fathom Candidate Akufo-Addo designing deft campaign commercials with an image of Jerry Jato bitterly and sarcastically accusing his sometime second-bananas for having reduced the entire lexicon of the Dagomba and Gonja languages, for example, to one English word – “PAIN”!

*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 Insttitute (DI) and 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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