Barely a week after whirlwind-touring some urban Ghanaian communities, here in the United States, with a beggar’s bowl in hand, the perennial presidential candidate of the so-called National Democratic Congress (NDC) stood in Ghana’s Central Regional town of Breman-Asikuma spitting hellfire and swearing to ensure that the NDC would flatly reject any polling returns emanating from the Ghanaian Diaspora come Election 2008 (Ghanaweb.com 9/2/07).
In all likelihood, what must have motivated Professor John Evans Atta-Mills to scamper into the United States, with a beggar’s bowl in hand, was the wildly-reported milking of Ghanaian residents in Texas, to the incredibly whopping tune of $ 700, 000 (Seven-Hundred Thousand American Dollars), by Mr. Rawlings and his wife, Nana Konadu Agyeman.
Could it, therefore, be that the latter, having found Diaspora Ghanaian generosity to be boundless, assuming that, indeed, the Rawlingses had been offered that whopping much, decided it best to call upon their minion to take undue advantage of the same, rather than “socialistically” sharing their pelf with their servile surrogate?
And so after scamming some unsuspecting Ghanaian residents of Worcester, Massachussetts ( I am glad my brother-in-law was too busy working to have allowed himself to be scammed),“Professor Humility” proceeded to Atlanta, Georgia, and then to The Bronx, New York, of all places, to celebrate the Homowo festivities with the latter locale’s Ghanaian residents. And need yours truly add that when an aspiring president of Ghana, and a former vice-president, to boot, finds himself celebrating Homowo, the most significant annual festival of our nation’s capital, abroad, with a beggar’s bowl in hand, his political priorities could not be more obvious to the Ghanaian electorate.
Or could it also be that not having allowed themselves to be scammed with reckless abandon, the way Mr. and Mrs. Rawlings were reportedly able to do, by “Professor Humility,” the NDC presidential candidate got so “pissed” – in urban American parlance – that he decided to “diss” his Ghanaian-American hosts, once back home, by summarily attempting to deny them their inviolable and inalienable franchise?
Fortunately, the critical question of whether Diaspora Ghanaians ought to be allowed to cast their ballots in Election 2008, is not one for Professor Atta-Mills and his political overlords to determine but, rather, it is the call of the legitimately constituted Ghana Electoral Commission.
Alas, once again, “Professor Humility” appears to have let his surrogate, dictatorial political ambitions get the best of him. Yet another salient signal to all democracy-loving Ghanaians to watch out for the apocalyptic reprise of P/NDC neocolonialist dictatorship. And here also, it bears reminding the good and law-abiding people of Breman-Asikuma, and the equally marvelous citizens of Ghana’s Central Region, in general, that more than any of its kind, the New Patriotic Party (NPP), the direct granddaughter of the seminal United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC), has its germinal roots in the Central Region; and even more significantly, that the Party of Paa Grant, Kurankyi-Taylor and the immortalized Kobina Sekyi is also their inalienable and unassailable ideological homestead.
In the end, what the NDC will be willing to abide by, or even accept, is far, far less relevant than the imperative need for Ghana’s Electoral Commission to uphold stringent and inviolable democratic protocol, going into our momentous electoral season. In sum, the country’s electoral laws must not be allowed to be held hostage by the P/NDC, whose nihilistic and swashbuckling leaders dominated the Ghanaian political landscape for 12 years by edict and unremitting bloodbath, and thus are the least of experts worthy of being consulted on both the construction and development of a civilized democratic culture.
That the Dzelukope-born National Democratic Congress has taken Fantes and the good people of the Central Region for granted, can hardly be gainsaid. And here, we readily recall the “slappocratic” treatment of the late Mr. Kow Nkensen Arkaah; and we must also hasten to add the fact that we may never get to quite learn of exactly how many dirty slaps Monsieur Rawlings has unleashed at Professor Atta-Mills, Mr. Arkaah’s homeboy.
It also beats one’s imagination as to why a purportedly intelligent man like Mr. Ekwow Spio-Garbrah, Chief Executive Officer of the Commonwealth Telecommunications Organization (CTO), would add his name to the “slappocratic” list of Monsieur Rawlings’ lickspittles. Then, of course, there is the equally disgusting and outright flagrant case of near-assassination of Ms. Frances Essiam, the former NDC Women’s Organizer, by authorized thugs of the founding P/NDC pontiff.
Indeed, it was not without good reason that at the same venue that “Professor Humility” issued his threat against potential Diaspora Ghanaian voters, Mr. Johnson Asiedu-Nketiah (a.k.a. “General Mosquito”), in an uncharacteristically sober tone, advised NDC supporters and sympathizers to eschew provocative and abusive language during the 2008 electioneering campaign. No doubt, “General Mosquito’s” call would have been more far-reaching, had the notorious rubble-rouser also called on the stalwart likes of Mr. Rawlings and the “Dis-”Honorable Tanko Ibrahim Rauf to keep their kangaroo arms to themselves.
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