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

In the wake of the publication of the inability of the Ghana National Fire Service (GNFS) to determine the cause of the February 14, 2010 conflagration that, reportedly, reduced the private residence of longtime Ghanaian strongman Jeremiah John Rawlings to bare steel beams and rubbles, several prominent citizens have taken issue with the nation’s chief fire quenchers.
What these critics ought to have constructively highlighted is that the admittedly woeful inability of the GNFS to determine the cause of the conflagration was likely primarily due to the fact that during his 20-year tenure as both de facto and de jure national chief executive, Mr. Rawlings did a woeful little to upgrade the functional status of the Ghana National Fire Service to that of a first-class establishment of its kind.
In other words, Dr. Kwasi Aning, a man whom I very much respect and with whom I have exchanged E-mail correspondence a couple of times in the recent past, is grossly remiss to insist that merely because he is a former head-of-state, the cause of the fire that gutted the Ridge residence of the Rawlingses ought to have been definitively determined by the personnel of our woefully under-equipped fire brigade. No argument could be more scientifically untenable.
For starters, none of the members of the panel of investigators commissioned to determine the cause of the fire was also known to be a member of the Rawlingses’ household. What the foregoing implies is that like most fire cases, all that the committee had to go by was forensic evidence which could only be effectively collected with the most sophisticated of modern technology designed for such purpose. And the only way to have guaranteed the same would have been for Mr. Rawlings to prioritize the very critical role and activities of the GNFS.
Here in the United States, for example, fire service personnel (and I have had many students who were both professional and volunteer firemen in the school where I currently teach) – as well as the police and emergency health personnel – are appropriately classified as “First Responders” to critical or crises situations. Consequently, the foregoing occupational sectors, among several others, are accorded funding priority by both the federal and local governments.
In Ghana, on the other hand, I have personally witnessed a clearly preventable fire wreckage – at the old 4th Battalion of Infantry Barracks in Kumasi. However, because the regional fire service station was dispiritingly ill-equipped, the arriving personnel could not perform the tasks for which they had been specially trained. In the particular instance that I am recalling (a little over twenty-five years ago) a good friend’s father’s “apartment,” among several others, was literally razed to ashes because upon their fairly prompt arrival at the scene, the firemen could not locate any standpipe – or hydrant – from which to draw water to quench the quite containable fire.
In sum, what leading security experts like Dr. Aning, of the renowned Kofi Annan Peace-Keeping Training Center, ought to be asking is whether, in fact, the Rawlingses’ residence was even equipped with portable emergency fire hydrants/cylinders of the type that I used to occasionally see in some public buildings while growing up in Ghana, such as the Legon Hospital and Burma Camp.
In other words, I guess what I am trying to unmistakably communicate here is that one simply cannot reap where one has not sown. And since Mr. Rawlings and his minions of the so-called Provisional National Democratic Congress (P/NDC) are not widely known to have rigged up the GNFS into the salutary mode of a “First Responders” establishment, it would be simply foolhardy for anyone to expect the agency to have acted in any other way or manner than it did in both its response to the fire outbreak as well as being able to effectively determine the cause of the same.
It is, however, significant to note that in spite of its being unacceptably under-equipped to deal with the problem of suspected arson, nonetheless, the committee charged with this thankless job at least managed to not quite unreasonably surmise that “power fluctuation” likely caused the wreckage. We must also quickly note that at the time of this writing (6/9/10), it had been reported that the government of the so-called National Democratic Congress (NDC) had requested assistance from Ghana’s old colonial mistress with determining the cause of the Rawlings conflagration.
On the preceding score, two things are worth observing. The first of these regards the fact that not many Ghanaians who have their homes burned down on a daily basis have any publicly funded panel of investigators commissioned to determine the cause, and then have the fairly objective findings of the committee/commission rudely trashed for not producing results that are up to par with some pre-determined expectations.
If, indeed, Rawlings lickspittles like Mr. Kofi Adams possessed the requisite expertise, then why did they tarry until the government had expended considerable monetary and manpower resources investigating the incident before coming out with cynical remarks solely aimed at impugning both the competence and integrity of the GNFS?
And secondly, what is wrong with Mr. Sam Sowah Oblejumah, the public relations director of the Ghana National Fire Service, advising the Rawlingses and their minions to expressly apply, perhaps in writing, for an official copy of the results of the investigation?
You see, the bloody couple have been so used to routinely ordering people around and at their beck and call that faced with a more refined and systematic protocol under a democratic dispensation, the saturnine couple begin to throw a fit. Of course, beneath such tantrum is the following sneering statement: “How dare you, Oblejumah, Chief SOB, to presume to subsume us under common-people’s laws! Who born dog and cat, Mr. Oblejumah Nobody?”
To be certain, Dr. Kwasi Aning does not help matters when the Kofi Annan Institute security expert implicitly asserts that, somehow, Mr. Rawlings and his wife deserve answers to which the bloody couple is/are clearly not entitled – which is to be comfortably told that a New Patriotic Party sympathizer torched their mansion. And it is for this reason why we couldn’t agree more with Mr. Oblejumah that Dr. Aning’s criticism is, indeed, nothing short of the “most unfortunate” (See “Kwasi Aning Chides Fire Service Over Undetermined Cause of ‘Rawlings’ Fire” Modernghana.com 5/11/10).

*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 21 books, including “Paa: A Tribute” (iUniverse.com, 2004). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net.
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