Konadu Rawlings Blasts Prez Kufuor

The former First Lady and President of the 31st December Women’s Movement (DWM), Nana Konadu Agyeman Rawlings, has once again taken a swipe at the government, saying her trial at the courts were politically orchestrated to frustrate and embarrass her. She said there was no basis to attempt to reconcile her family and President Kufuor because her family was better off without the President.

Sounding as defiant as ever, she called the sitting President, John Agyekum Kuffuor, ‘a constitutional dictator’, and contended that his administration’s governance style was not democratic.

“I have a problem reconciling with a President who has made up his mind (not to allow to work) a cocoa factory that we have struggled, going backwards and forwards to China, to negotiate with them and actually built….Mr. Kufuor is not allowing this project to work and I’m supposed to reconcile with him on what issues?”

The former First Lady, who was the guest on Joy fm yesterday, maintained that the government was definitely out to get her, describing the situation in Ghana today as a Misrule of Law. She said the issues that affected people were the most important for reconciliation, explaining that after having discussions with a number of eminent persons over the cocoa project from China, she was convinced that she and her family would be better off keeping their distance from the sitting president.

She further alleged that the current animosity between her family and the President originated from the end of the President’s, citing Kofi Annan, former UN Secretary-General, Chief Emeka Anyaoku, former Commonwealth secretary-General, and Mr. Eddie Osei, Kufuor’s nephew, as some of the prominent people she discussed the matter with, but whose interventions came to nothing. Nana Konadu denied ever calling the President ‘a crafty dictator’, but stressed that it was an apt description she would love to use for him.

Asked to explain what she meant by the misrule of law, she recalled the 30 criminal charges she was currently facing in court and said the Auditor-General should have first referred her outfit to Parliament before hauling its leadership before court. She indicated that contrary to the sympathies being showered on her by her friends in relation to the court trials she was undergoing, she had nothing to worry about, stressing that she was not afraid of going to jail.

Mrs. Rawlings told the show host that her trials were mere ploys aimed at diverting attention from the good works she had been doing for women.

“It’s been twisted by the powers that be. That is, from the President to the Auditor-General”, she said. According to her, government agents had very often asked members of the public, who had any affiliation to the DWM to resign before they were given what they constitutionally deserved. She alleged that even teachers employed in the movement’s schools were prevailed upon to resign from their posts, adding that the intent was to collapse the schools.

The DWM president described the Minister of Information, Hon. Kwamena Bartels, and the New Patriotic Party (NPP) General Secretary, Nana Ohene Ntow, as serial liars who had lied so often that they tended to believe their own lies.

“I don’t know why they like to lie. I would love to know where I was when the sniffer dog came round me. They lie and then they start believing their own lies and then they have press conferences over the lies, and then they keep on and on”, she said, observing that those responsible for churning out the lies may end up destroying the country’s moral fibre.

Asked for her final word, Mrs. Rawlings, who relentlessly defended the December 1981 revolution that overthrew a democratically elected government in Ghana, vented her spleen on President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria, saying he did not deserve the National Award bestowed on him by President Kufuor recently, because according to her, he was destroying a democratic process in his country through what she called ‘a barbaric way’.

“My last word is to ask Ghanaians to pray for Nigeria”, she concluded.