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Opinions of Tuesday, 9 February 2016

Columnist: Okoampa-Ahoofe, Kwame

Greenstreet is too vindictive to be an effective president

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Feb. 5, 2016
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

Two years ago in Kumasi, the Asante Regional Capital, when the then-General-Secretary of the rump-Convention People’s Party (r-CPP) was invited as a guest-speaker of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC), Mr. Ivor Kobina Greenstreet mordantly lit into the leadership of the host party by promising to permanently put them out of business in the highly unlikely event of him and the r-CPP being voted into power.

Back then, in what was supposed to be his message of solidarity to the Mahama Posse, the newly elected 2016 Presidential Candidate of the rump-Convention People’s Party warned the NDC operatives to ensure that they had highly competent men and women in place to manage the affairs of an opposition-consigned NDC, because an r-CPP government was intent on literally running the Rawlings-minted faux-revolutionary party out of town. Mr. Greenstreet went on to sneer at the Mahama Posse’s so-called Better Ghana Agenda.

“This Buronya [Christmas/Whiteman’s Season of Bountifulness] is very dry,” the wheelchair-confined Mr. Greenstreet bawled to the rapturous delight of Ms. Samia Yaba Nkrumah, who recently accused her former political playmate of having unethically bought his way into securing the r-CPP’s 2016 presidential nomination. “You are the only beneficiaries of your own Better Ghana Agenda. The people in the streets are not feeling it.” Mr. Greenstreet went on to poignantly observe that the NDC’s congress had been literally turned into a Yuletide “Boxing Day” Affair, whereby party members were orgiastically engaged in the profligate and obscene exchange of gifts, instead of seriously deliberating on how to make the country’s economy more vibrant and beneficial to the citizenry at large.

Those were unquestionably the progressively biting and hard-hitting words of a determined young Ghanaian politician poised to putting the country’s virtually bankrupt economy on sound footing. Now, alas, it is slowly becoming clear that Mr. Greenstreet is, after all, a run-of-the-mill cynical old-guard Cii-Pii-Pii-ite hell-bent on a vengeful mission of the primitivistic revolutionary sort introduced onto an otherwise placid and progressive Ghanaian political landscape by the Rawlingses, unarguably the most violent, destructive, corrupt, criminal and exploitive “power-couple” in postcolonial Ghanaian history.

There is a tired old adage that runs as follows: “Show me your friend, and I will show you who you are,” or “Show me your friend, and I will show you your character.” In the case of Mr. Greenstreet, a third variation to the preceding maxim could aptly be translated as follows: “Show me your friend, and I will show you your true colors.” Well, Mr. Greenstreet has just announced that he intends to team up with Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings, the bloodily and dirtily corrupt former first lady who conspired with her equally bloodthirsty husband, namely, Chairman Jerry John Rawlings, to abduct and summarily execute the three Akan-descended Accra High Court judges, in the lead-up to Election 2016.

We must also pertinently underscore the fact that following her sound trouncing at the 2010 NDC Presidential-Election Primary in Sunyani, the Brong-Ahafo Regional Capital, Mrs. Rawlings broke away from the National Democratic Congress and founded her own political party, the so-called National Democratic Party (NDP). We must also highlight the sole motive for Mrs. Rawlings’ decision to break away from her husband’s party for the benefit of eligible and prospective voters who may have so soon forgotten about the same.

In her own words at the time, the now-late President John Evans Atta-Mills, Chairman Rawlings’ former arch-lieutenant and the man who was charged with continuing the political hatchet work of the half-Scottish former Ghana Airforce flight-lieutenant, had proven himself to be too soft and unequal to the task, that is, the imperative need of rounding up and indiscriminately and rigorously prosecuting each and every one of the cabinet appointees of the erstwhile John Agyekum-Kufuor-led government of the New Patriotic Party, largely because former President Kufuor had dared to prosecute the criminal likes of Messrs. Kwame Peprah, Tsatsu Tsikata and Selormey for willfully and negligently causing financial loss to the state.

Well, those of us who closely and studiously monitored the equally vindictive government of President Mills are fully aware of the fact that it was not the abject lack of will that prevented the former Legon tax-law professor from railroading former Kufuor appointees on retaliatory charges of causing financial loss to the state. President Mills had actually put at least three former Kufuor cabinet appointees on trial and epically lost. It had then become obvious to the Fante Ekumfi-Otuam native that any more attempts to blindly pursuing that pathologically vindictive route would only counterproductively cause more financial loss to an already thoroughly bankrupt state.

The preceding, in a gist, is the profile of the woman with whom Mr. Greenstreet wants to collaborate in order to politically and practically insult the intelligence of the long-suffering albeit indisputably savvy Ghanaian citizenry. Mr. Greenstreet also wants Ghanaians to believe that the rump-Convention People’s Party has substance beyond its veritably being a “historical society” jam-packed with a gang of rascals and reprobates and a handful of wistful and grossly misguided Ghanaians too mnemonically deprived to appreciate the untold atrocities visited on Ghanaians and our beloved country by the Kwame Nkrumah-led proto-Convention People’s Party.

“Never Again!” as many a Jewish victim of Chancellor Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany is wont to say.

*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs