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

You would think that he would be using whatever is left of his troublesome and troubled existence to help resolve the Stygian socioeconomic and cultural mess that he has wreaked on Ghanaians. Instead, the incurably and unconscionably self-righteous goon prefers to meddle in affairs well beyond the chicken-coop horizon of his ken. Most recently, he tried to buy time for Libya's Muammar Gadhafy, his cutthroat "revolutionary" mentor and, some have suggested, sometime paymaster, and failed miserably.

And so it is quite clear that when it comes to the Crimean and Ukrainian crisis, Mr. Rawlings is definitely not on the side of democratic justice and accountability. He simply wants his voice to be heard for no particularly relevant reasons. He just wants to sound out and hope that one of the leaders of the global powers, largely European and Asian, would pick up his decidedly weak below-the-radar vibe, pat him on the back and commend him for being a good boy (See "Rawlings: AU Must Speak Out On Ukraine" MyJoyOnline.com 3/6/14).

He also pathetically supposes that most of the world is still stuck in the "venetian" days of the 1950s and 60s, when a largely unsuspecting world, or at least a moiety of the world, could readily be made to believe in something as politically absurd as the so-called Non-Aligned Movement, a double-visioned and two-timing ideological club largely composed of disgruntled and egomaniacal dictators hell-bent on hanging onto power even while ironically espousing some bizarre mode political arrangement cynically and variously tagged as "People's Power" and "Democratic Socialism."

It is quite obvious that the man who effectively reduced Ghana to the unenviable status of economic receivership has yet to show any palpable sign of intellectual and ideological maturity. He is still an impenitent Leftist of the blood-dripping breed. Which explains his knee-jerk fixation with the hulking Russia of the Cold War era and his faux-moderate support of a dreamy, power-drunken imperialist Vladimir Putin, suavely, albeit absurdly, nuanced in the form of his staunch support of Prime Minister Cameron's tentative, albeit pragmatic, advocacy of a namby-pamby policy of kid-glove diplomacy.

Well, on the preceding score, Mr. Rawlings is apt in asserting that such policy pablum is the least that the leaders of the irreparable train-wreck that is the so-called African Union (AU) could do to establish their relevance in such high-stakes global affair as the raging heated political slugfest on the Ukraine. I bet he would be far better off chatting up the AU's absolute and morally stultifying impotence on the Malian question, let alone South Sudan. Which is perfectly reflective of the embarrassingly irrelevant Mr. Rawlings, a man perpetually caught up in his own clinical dementia of global self-importance.

He may not remember this, but most of us Ghanaians past a half-century years old vividly remember Mr. Rawlings' rude and adamant refusal, at the earnest request of President Ronald Reagan, to pardon the victims of his June 1979 "Season of Joyful Massacre" that sent some eight Ghanaian generals, both retired and active, and other senior officers of the Ghana Armed Forces to the gallows. It is also rather ludicrous to hear Mr. Rawlings bicker and rave about the need for the maintenance of a bipolar coherence of the global superpower structure with Russia, implicitly, countervailing the overwhelming influence of the United States and its Western allies.

The spot-on relevant question to ask is this: Did Mr. Rawlings allow or countenance the salutary existence of a bipolar political culture during the bulk of the two protracted decades that he effectively held Ghanaians by our scruff?

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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
March 6, 2014
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
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