We Have Heard This Nonsense Before

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Oct. 20, 2015
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

We have heard this nonsense about the late President John Evans Atta-Mills’ having been “mistakenly” selected by Chairman Jerry John Rawlings for the vice-presidency and, subsequently, the presidency. I hope this Tawiah-Boateng guy, who is described as the Eastern Regional Chairman of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) is not related to my well-respected PERSCO senior, Mr. Karikari-Boateng and the latter’s elder brother and my PERSCO National-Service tutor in the late 1970s, Mr. Tawiah-Boateng (aka TABOAT). Mr. Tawiah-Boateng, a walking Shakespearean drama compendium, was indisputably one of the best English Literature teachers I ever had schooling in Ghana. The other two were Justice Smith Adu-Ampomah, my belatedly discovered paternal cousin; and, of course, Mr. Amoako, deceased, formerly of the Opoku-Ware School and later pioneer lecturer of English at the University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, presently known as the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology and the elder brother of Dr. K. Y. Amoako, the renowned UNDP economist. All these brilliant teachers are alumni of the J. B. Danquah Academy of the University of Ghana.

What is surprising, though, is that anytime an NDC operative mischievously attempts to link a sickly President Atta-Mills with Nana Akufo-Addo, such calculated mischief invariably backfires into that mischief-maker’s own face. And yet, these hustlers and thieves of the public dole do not relent. We have riposted in the past and hereby reprise the same, namely, that the late Legon tax-law professor was not selected as Mr. Rawlings’ running-mate and then three-time presidential candidate for anything besides sheer strategic convenience. And it seems to have worked to good effect for Chairman Rawlings. At least the third time around. We also know that the Anlo-Ewe chieftain selected the so-called King-of-Peace purely on the basis of pacifying the Fante Wing of the Trokosi Nationalist Party (TNP), the real name of the Rawlings-minted National Democratic Congress, in the wake of the double-slapping of the late Mr. Ekwow Nkensen Arkaah, a man rumored to have been older than Chairman Rawlings’ own birth mother, who had presumed to call the dictatorial lunacy of the career junta leader and diarrheal coup-plotter what it veritably and indubitably was.

Predictably, however, in invoking the name of Dr. Atta-Mills, Mr. Tawiah-Boateng, the Eastern Region’s NDC Chairman, intended to impugn the age and state of health of Nana Akufo-Addo. But, of course, such devious political referencing has not worked because while the two men were, indeed, of the same age and classmates at the University of Ghana, the fact still stands that the late President and the 2016 New Patriotic Party’s Presidential Candidate are not clones. Besides, the fact that President Mills’ fraternal twin-brother, Dr. Cadman Mills, is alive and hale-and-hearty ought to send a sobering signal to these NDC guttersnipes that attempting to project the ill-health and clearly premature demise of President Mills on Nana Akufo-Addo will not work.

Maybe Mr. Tawiah-Boateng would do much and far better by researching and telling Ghanaians precisely what killed President Mills, since the latter’s former right-hand man and now-President John Dramani Mahama has scandalously shown himself to be woefully incapable of doing so. In the end, whether Mr. Tawiah-Boateng apologizes for his Atta-Mills “gaffe” or not is decidedly beside the point (See “NDC Chair Apologizes Over ‘Mills Was a Mistake’ Comment” Ghanaweb.com 10/20/15). What is crystal clear here is that the ghost of the possibly slain President Atta-Mills would not allow itself to be peacefully and quietly laid to rest until the truth of its former owner’s passing has been thoroughly explained to the Ghanaian people. In other words, the very institutional apparatus of the National Democratic Congress is a haunted house, a charnel, in Shakespearean parlance. A tomb!