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

They call themselves The Informer, but it is not clear exactly who they presume to inform, short of their own Trokosi Amen Corner. By now, it ought to be clear to all thinking and civilized Ghanaian citizens that while, indeed, the New Patriotic Party (NPP) might have been booted from office in 2008, largely of their own doing, it is indubitably clear that Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo was flagrantly defeated in 2012 by the collaborative criminality of Messrs. William Atuguba, John Dramani Mahama and Kwadwo Afari-Gyan. A prominent monarch has even been added to the mix.

But that is not the focus of our present discussion, which regards the drill ship called Discoverer 511 (See "Revealed: Kufuor, Akufo-Addo, Others Sold GNPC Ship to Benefit" The Informer/Ghanaweb.com 10/26/13). You see, when I think of the "Looting Brigade," I have in mind the GYEEDA scam-artists who constitute the top-hierarchy of the so-called National Democratic Congress (NDC), and not their far more visionary and progressive counterparts of the New Patriotic Party.

First of all, as already noted in a previous article, we need to critically examine the circumstances and terms surrounding the purchase of the drill ship Discoverer 511, in particular as to whether the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation-owned vessel was being put to at least optimal use at the time that President John Agyekum-Kufuor allegedly authorized sale of the same. We clearly know, for example, that Ghana was not a net exporter of crude oil until the Kufuor-led NPP government assumed the democratic reins of governance. And so really, the relevant question becomes: To what profitable use was Discoverer 511 being put at the time of its disposal. The answer to the foregoing question ought to tell us who the veritable operatives of the so-called Looting Brigade are.

Indeed, for anybody or group of persons who singularly and criminally caused the effective liquidation of the country's publicly owned and operated industrial base - a la GIHOC divestiture - to be calling those whose primary crime appears to be the yeomanly reconstruction of the country's savaged economy "the Looting Brigade," beats the imagination. It pretty much reminds me of the NPP's Nkrumah fanatic, a contradiction in terms, to be certain, who had occasion recently to describe yours truly as "a chartered member of the Akyem Mafia," even as the notorious Carolina Nigger unctuously claimed to be appropriating the most elevated of political discourses.

But, of course, that is to be expected of the pathologically alienated Trokosi Nationalists whose primary relationship to Ghana is patently one akin to a quarry and the quarried. In other words, for the editors and publishers of the so-called Informer newspaper, Ghana exists exclusively to be blindly exploited for the benefit of those who have contributed the least to its socioeconomic, cultural and political development.

The Trokosi Nationalists know perfectly well that they cannot achieve their primitive Darwinian objectives by civilized democratic means, thus their intermittent barbaric flirtation with military interventionism. It would be quite edifying for the Trokosi Nationalists to enumerate the indisputable benefits to our national intellectual, economic and sociocultural development under two decades of the Rawlings-led governments of the so-called Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) and the National Democratic Congress (NDC), by comparing such benefits to those achieved under President Kufuor and even Gen. Ignatius Kutu Acheampong's National Redemption Council (NRC) and the Supreme Military Council (SMC-I).

What is interesting and significant to note is that the opportune and auspicious removal of Mr. Tsatsu "The Thief" Tsikata from the directorship of the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC) was effected by the Generalissimo of the Trokosi Mafia himself, Togbui Avaklasu Rawlings I, and not Mr. Kufuor. And here ought to be put paid all self-serving doubts and wishful obstinacy. Mr. Tsikata is a convicted criminal who ought to have been banned, for life, from practising before any legitimately constituted court of the land, let alone the august Supreme Court of Ghana. The country's judicial authorities have an uphill task vis-a-vis the restoration of the credibility of the bench.

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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
Oct. 26, 2013
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
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