Konadu Rawlings cannot run away from Mahama’s dismal record

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
October 16, 2016
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

Ghanaians, in general, are known to be morbidly afflicted with short memories; but we are more than intelligent enough to remember that it was Mrs. Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings and her bloody conjugal and political bedmate, Chairman Jerry John Rawlings, who created and nurtured the insufferably vindictive and extortionate political juggernaut that goes by the farcically ironic name of the National Democratic Congress (NDC).

And if today Mrs. Agyeman-Rawlings has decided to jump ship and form and own her own party, called the National Democratic Party (NDP), it is primarily because the longest reigning Ghanaian First-Lady quickly became disillusioned once her immitigably repressive husband handed over the reins of governance, as mandated by the country’s 1992 Republican Constitution, and her husband’s relatively mild-mannered former arch-lieutenant, Prof. John Evans Atta-Mills assumed the reins governance, after the Kufuor-led New Patriotic Party (NPP) had served out two four-year terms as the first genuinely democratically elected president and political party, respectively, of Ghana’s Fourth Republic.

Mrs. Agyeman-Rawlings’ sole reason for wanting to be president of Ghana was so that she could teach the departed leaders of the New Patriotic Party a mnemonically indelible lesson in retaliatory politics, otherwise known as the politics of revenge. Mrs. Agyeman-Rawlings thus mounted an epic challenge in 2010 against President Atta-Mills, with the backing of Chairman Rawlings, but predictably lost miserably.

Back then, as she publicly let it be known, the former First-Lady’s sole reason for challenging the former University of Ghana’s tax-law professor was that President Mills had been too soft on the erstwhile members of President John Agyekum-Kufuor’s cabinet. Like U.S. Republican Party’s 2016 presidential candidate and the latter’s one-trick campaign to impugn the leadership integrity and biological citizenship of President Barack H. Obama, otherwise known as the “Birther” campaign, Mrs. Konadu-Agyeman has absolutely no foresighted, or visionary, agenda for the development of the very country that she so wickedly collaborated with her blood-thirsty husband to near-irreparably wreck.

And today, having conveniently forgotten all about the untold hardship and fear imposed on most Ghanaians by Chairman Rawlings, Mrs. Agyeman-Rawlings now claims that the bulk of our nation’s problems is the handicraft of a pathologically corrupt President John Dramani Mahama, deliberately ignoring the fact that the younger man from Bole-Bamboi, in the West-Gonja District of the Northern Region, was specially mentored by Chairman Rawlings whose communications point-man Little Dramani once faithfully and, some even say, fanatically served.

In sum, no serious critic, student or scholar of postcolonial Ghanaian history and politics can divorce the abjectly dismal performance record of the Mahama-led government of the National Democratic Congress from that of the founding-father of that same party.

And so Mrs. Agyeman-Rawlings is only committing political suicide – not that she has ever had even a Chinaman’s shot at the presidency – when she quips that the greatest achievement of the Mahama government inheres in the scandalous dexterity with which the key operatives of the aforementioned government have been able to dramatically transform themselves into filthy-rich robber-barons while the rest of Ghanaian citizens barely held their necks above the floodwaters of the country’s near-total economic destruction (See They’re Changing Their Own Lives – Nana Konadu Jabs Mahama” 3News.com / Ghanaweb.com 10/6/16).

Maybe Nana Konadu could do herself great favor by telling Ghanaians precisely what her husband, Chairman Rawlings, did with the $5 million of the Nigerian taxpayer’s money squirreled to him at the Osu Castle, the country’s erstwhile seat of governance, by late dictator Gen. Sani Abacha, if not used for the collective self-transformation of the members of the Rawlings Clan, and perhaps the Tsikatas as well.

You see, it is this kind of criminal hypocrisy that makes yours truly want to throw up anytime that Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings opens up her mouth to spew the sort of garbage that has become her rhetorical trademark.

Now, the veritable bedmate of Satan has vowed to literally strip Ghana’s Electoral Commissioner naked and parade Mrs. Charlotte Kesson-Smith Osei through the principal streets of the Accra metropolis, in order to sensitize “this arrogant foreigner” to the real meaning of Ghanaian democracy, as well as to ensure that the EC’s Chair never makes the deadly mistake of disqualifying Nana Konadu from legitimately gunning for the job which Divine Providence created exclusively for her and her husband, and which Chairman Rawlings peremptorily occupied for some twenty years.

We have more to say about this scatological pronouncement in due course.

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