By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
August 13, 2014
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

You would think that a septuagenarian like Brig.-Gen. Joseph Nunoo-Mensah (Rtd.) would either decently shut up and be at home babysitting his grandchildren, or he would sparingly be making public statements laden with the kind of rare-gem wisdom routinely associated with his age-group, and be genuinely regretful and contrite for having woefully lacked the sort of professional discipline that he is now grandstanding about while he was a senior officer of the Ghana Armed Forces (GAF).

But, of course, not this nuisance of a superannuated bumpkin who never spares the least opportunity to make himself heard on issues on which he has little or absolutely no credibility, much less any remarkable expertise. His latest avocation appears to have taken the form of gratuitously lambasting justifiably striking polytechnic tutors and lecturers who are demanding the prompt restoration of the Book and Research Allowances (BRA) that have been part of their working conditions since Adam and Eve were driven out of the Rift Valley.

Rather, the Mahama government quizzically insists that the members of the Polytechnic Teachers' Association of Ghana (POTAG) deserve no such incentive. One wishes that President John Dramani Mahama and his minions were honest and manly enough to make the same claim against the quadrennial gratuities gratuitously awarded our Members of Parliament for work and reasons whose relevance and usefulness have yet to be rationally explained to the struggling Ghanaian taxpayer.

Brig.-Gen. Nunoo-Mensah's response to the striking POTAG membership has been to call these intellectual and professional superiors of his "undisciplined" and "lazy" (See "Nunoo-Mensah Fumes: Ghanaians Lack Discipline" Peacefmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 8/12/14). Maybe somebody ought to remind him, once again, that Brig.-Gen. Nunoo-Mensah is unarguably one of the most undisciplined Ghanaian citizens in the nearly 60 years of our country's postcolonial history. He is also on indelible record as having been one of the most hopeless and useless senior officers of the Ghana Armed Forces who followed a second-rate Flight-Lieutenant of the Ghana Airforce, like a bunch of zombies, into overthrowing a democratically and constitutionally elected government.

I mean, what sort of disciplined Brig.-Gen. allows a Flight-Lieutenant to take over the command of a whole nation's armed forces, and then become subservient to his unruly junior colleague by saluting a Flight-Lieutenant? Well, I have a ready answer for his type of soldier. Brig.-Gen. Nunoo-Mensah is a craven coward and an arrant fool who does not deserve to be entertained in the glorious company of gallant and brave Ghanaian workers. I mean, what kind of exemplary military disciplinarian, as he would have his audiences believe, takes instructions from subordinates and then call such craven cowardliness discipline?

What amuses me about the addled reaction of some key operatives and sympathizers of the ruling National Democratic Congress, though, is the rather vacuous and fatuous presumption that, somehow, the POTAG leaders must be taking their marching orders from the leaders of the main opposition New Patriotic Party. It is almost as if to suggest that these striking advanced college-degree holders are too stolid to appreciate their wanton and unconscionable exploitation by their former students, who now curiously claim to be more sociopolitically significant than the men and women who made then what they are today.

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