Opinions of Friday, 7 March 2008
Columnist: Okoampa-Ahoofe, Kwame
Crooked Trees and Congenital Cooks
Not quite long ago, I literarily tackled this same anti-Akyem tribal-nationalist who seems to be so pathetically flummoxed between his clearly paid-loyalty to the so-called Provisional National Democratic Congress (P/NDC) and his sub-ethnicity as a “naturalized” Asante. On that occasion, the subject was his evidently flagrant anti-Akyem, sub-ethnic animosity towards the current presidential candidate of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP), Nana Addo-Dankwa Akufo-Addo, whose name, by the way, this intransigent and rustic tribalist has yet to learn to correctly spell. Or is such glaring and embarrassing illiteracy also part of the P/NDC hack’s stock-in-trade?
Interestingly, just as many of us were beginning to believe that, at long last, this godforsaken P/NDC hack had begun to effectively use his gumption, thus his pronounced absence from the features column of Ghanaweb.com, after having been put in his rightful place the last time around, the lost soul re-surfaced with an article ignorantly and arrogantly titled “Soulless Ropal Defines a Clueless and Visionless Akuffo [sic] Addo!” (Ghanaweb.com 3/1/08). Perhaps somebody among his rag-tag posse of Rawlings-sponsored bullies had better warn this incurably lying, scheming and scamming hack that the least amenable of ( seemingly) potential postcolonial Ghanaian political scapegoats is one of Akyem sub-ethnic extraction, least of all the current and substantive presidential candidate of the ruling New Patriotic Party.
Indeed, in his last article of similar theme and crude tone the writer, who has spent at least the last three years baselessly accusing President J. A. Kufuor of wanton executive profligacy, finally decided that it would be more politically expedient to play our sitting premier against the latter’s presumptive successor. That expedient, if also unconscionable tack of divisive political strategy woefully fell on its prats – or more aptly, it suffered an all-too-predictable still-birth. Perhaps some levelheaded student of postcolonial Ghanaian politics needs to inform this evidently congenital ignoramus that modern Ghanaian politics began at Kyebi ( a la Saltpond, also a historically Akyem-settled land) and Mankessim, not Dzelukope or Anloga.
Now on the question of the virtual white-elephant which ROPAL (or the Representation of the People’s Assembly Law) appears to have become, at least in the lead-up to Election 2008, perhaps a more responsible and conscientious Ghanaian ought to point out to the P/NDC hack and his fellow journeymen and women that the tactically expedient, if also outright mischievous, notion of having Ghanaians resident abroad vote in Ghanaian elections was first hatched and introduced by the cynical and megalomaniacal operatives of the so-called Provisional National Democratic Congress (P/NDC), of which pseudo-civilian party the author of the patently vapid article titled “A Soulless Ropal Defines a Clueless and Visionless Akuffo[sic] Addo!” is a card-carrying member. In essence, it was the deft and resoundingly successful counter-strategy of the ruling New Patriotic Party that engendered ROPAL.
Indeed, this very writer personally saw and heard Mr. Jeremiah John Rawlings pontifically brag to African-American residents of Harlem, New York, in Mosque Number 7 (made famous by the immortalized Malcolm X), about the then-Ghanaian president’s intention of availing these Diaspora Africans of the Ghanaian ballot. And so, to tell the Ghanaian people the unalloyed truth, ROPA (later ROPAL) was Mr. Rawlings’ own “clueless” and “visionless” attempt to recklessly sell Ghanaian citizenship to African-Americans, not Ghanaian-born residents of the United States, most of whom were stampeded out of their motherland by Mr. Rawlings, or Diaspora Ghanaians elsewhere abroad!
We must also loudly drum into the numb skulls of this P/NDC hack and his ilk that the decision of Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan’s Electoral Commission to disallow Ghanaians resident abroad from voting in Election 2008, stems directly from the vehement protests of the hypocritical likes of Messrs. J. J. Rawlings, J. E. Atta-Mills and A. S. Bagbin. Needless to say, the latter posse of rabble-rousers had intended to use the overseas Ghanaian ballot in Election 2008 as a pretext to plunge the country into a Kenya- and Ivorian-type of an apocalypse, observing grimly and quite accurately that, once again, and for the third time (or fourth time, depending on how one reckons P/NDC electoral defeats over the last seven-and-half years), the P/NDC is assured of crushing trouncing come Election 2008.
Indeed, it is on the preceding score that some of us have kept tactically mute over Dr. Afari-Gyan’s rather perspicuous decision to effectively wean the desperate and megalomaniacal arch-operatives of the P/NDC of any pretext for any extra-electoral attempt to re-enter the Osu Castle, let alone the NPP-redesigned and reconstructed Flagstaff House. Unfortunately, some leading NPP-USA executives who ought to have long since wised up to this P/NDC snare are already up in arms over Dr. Afari-Gyan’s incontrovertibly foresighted decision and in the process inadvertently furthering the nihilistic cause of their inveterate political opponents.
It bears recalling, at this juncture, that in his foresighted decision, Dr. Afari-Gyan in no way precluded Ghanaians resident abroad from voting in Election 2008, as someone suggested on Ghanaweb.com recently. The Electoral Commissioner merely acknowledged the obvious, the fact that the country will not be able to muster the necessary logistics, in the form of adequate personnel and capital resources, well ahead of Election 2008.
In any case, isn’t it rather irrationally curious on the part of those legally tussling with the NPP government over the right of Ghanaian residents abroad to vote in Election 2008, the fact that the originators of ROPA (ROPAL), the so-called Provisional National Democratic Congress (P/NDC), could only brag about their intention, and not be able to even vote it into the transitional status of a Bill, let alone pass it into Law, in nearly 20 years of P/NDC rule? Indeed, what Dr. Afari-Gyan, Ghana’s Electoral Commissioner, has said is that those Ghanaians resident abroad who are religiously eager to vote come Election 2008, could purchase a plane ticket and fly in to vote in any constituencies of their own choosing. And exactly what is wrong with the preceding advice?
Now speaking of “the pernicious fruits of a bankrupt and corrupt political system,” perhaps we need to inform the author of the article titled “A Soulless Ropal Defines a Clueless and Visionless Akuffo[sic] Addo!” that it was President Kufuor, not Nana Akufo-Addo, who presided over the crafting and passage of ROPA into ROPAL. Or is it the author’s “Asanteness” that seems to be blinding him from this glaring fact?
Then again, speaking of “the pernicious fruits of a bankrupt and corrupt political system,” has the writer ever heard of the “corrupt” and “pernicious” names of the following Ghanaians: Messrs. Rawlings, Obeng (of SCANCEM infamy), Selormey, Abodakpi, Tsikata and Peprah? Or, the preceding are also the names of NPP operatives? What of Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings and GIHOC? Indeed, while I was growing up, my maternal grandfather, the Rev. T. H. Sintim (1896-1982), was fond of saying that: “One should never attempt to straighten a crooked tree, or it might fall on that righteous one.”
“A word to the wise,” you say? Keep it to yourself, sucker!
Views expressed by the author(s) do not necessarily reflect those of GhanaHomePage.
