Junior Jesus Storms Abuja

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

“Our man in Abuja” recently went at it again; and in his latest self-justifying confession to a forum of the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), the June Fourth Apostle of Populism was reported to be claiming that the brutal execution of Ghana’s most senior military officials, in June 1979, was both “regrettable” and “inevitable.”

Of course, it is hardly surprising that Mr. Rawlings could reconcile such paradoxical characterization of his June Fourth Carnage. Over the years, it has become increasingly evident that the man is clinically schizophrenic.

What is both peeving and flabbergasting about his interpretation of the bloody events in the wake of June Fourth, these days, is Mr. Rawlings’ rather cavalier attempt to scapegoat the general Ghanaian populace in his sanguinary putsch. And, of course, he is readily able to do this because as a populist, pistol-packing demagogue, the man was able to coerce Ghanaians into pretending as if we were all wholeheartedly in favor of his “Ajanguda” activities. I, personally, remember being among a group of spectators and performers at Kumasi’s Anokyekrom of the Ghana National Cultural Center – the authentically original Center for National Culture, or whatever it is called these days – that was routinely forced, almost every Saturday, to sing patriotic songs by a lance-corporal from Ghana’s Fourth Battalion of Infantry (4BN), located across the street and directly behind both the Police Headquarters and the Okomfo Anokye Teaching Hospital. I lived in the military barracks myself, my uncle being the Deputy Padre or Chaplain.

The lance-corporal looked to be barely out of his teens, and could easily have been the son or grandson of quite a remarkable percentage of the members of the audience. On Saturdays, however, Lance-Corporal Atetekwaa (not his real name) reigned supreme. The trick lay in the AK-47 slung over his right shoulder which, from time to time, and almost as if to remind us, his hostages, of exactly where power lay, in common Ghanaian parlance, he would romantically caress, masturbation fashion, as he preached what Lance-Corporal Atetekwaa presumed to be the inviolable Gospel According to the Revolution. The details largely verged on the platitudinous, “Love Your Country, “Keep Our Streets and Your Backyards Clean,” and so on and so forth.

To be certain, if you had been brought up the way most decent Ghanaians had been, Lance-Corporal Atetekwaa sounded insufferably insolent; it was almost as if, somehow, the key players of June Fourth had curiously convinced themselves that most Ghanaians were now emerging into the glorious realm of modern civilization. And I was to shortly conclude, with deep-seated conviction, that Mr. Rawlings and his henchmen needed to be promptly committed to a mental asylum. For it soon became obvious that this was a “revolution” devoid of any substantive agenda, short of the kind of platitudes indulged by Lance-Corporal Atetekwaa.

We belted those patriotic songs with theatrical gusto and, I readily confess, I even loved many of them – these were largely staple compositions by the likes of Dr. Ephraim Amu, Rev. Otto Boateng and Mr. J. T. Essuman, among a host of others. Still, it is hardly an ideal choral milieu when you have an AK-47-masturbating lance-corporal conducting your choir. Under those bleak circumstances, there was little else that any of us could do; you couldn’t imprison yourself in perpetuity. And to be certain, Anokyekrom remarkably assuaged whatever was left of our collective sanity in the wake of the traumatic events of June Fourth.

Indeed, it is not quite clear exactly what he means when Mr. Rawlings insists, against verifiable historical evidence, that it was the obstreperous rage of the general Ghanaian populace that forced him and his self-righteous accomplices to summarily execute the three former Ghanaian heads-of-state and the five other military rulers. To be certain, it was largely the published photographs of the execution of Generals I. K. Acheampong and Utuka that caused a majority of Ghanaians to begin questioning both the significance and motive of June Fourth. The truth of the matter is that Mr. Rawlings’ promise to return the country to civic democratic governance was largely what meliorated public outcry against the summary executions of the senior military officers.

The founding proprietor of the Provisional National Democratic Congress (P/NDC) also told the News Agency of Nigeria that his initial agenda “was to execute only former head-of-state, Gen. I. K. Acheampong and Gen. Utuka” (Thisdayonline.com 5/12/08). This is quite curious, because Gen. Acheampong, at the time of the AFRC putsch, had been out of power for about a year or more, having been ousted, and summarily stripped of his rank of “General” as well as all his other military credentials, in what was then termed as a palace coup led by Gen. F. W. K. Akuffo.

The preceding notwithstanding, if, indeed, it was their uncompromising love of democratic culture that motivated the June Fourth putsch, as spokesman (Maj.) Boakye-Djan has insisted again and again, then this assertion does not square up with Mr. Rawlings’ short-shrift treatment of both the democratically elected President Hilla Limann, who succeeded the AFRC, and the salutary political culture of democracy itself, as evidenced by the protracted dictatorship of the so-called Provisional National Democratic Congress (P/NDC). But even more significantly, Mr. Rawlings has never let any chance slip by without proudly reiterating his inveterate aversion for democratic culture, including at least one such widely reported pronouncement on the floor of Ghana’s National Assembly.

Indeed, Mr. Rawlings’ self-serving insistence that there was no way out of executing the eight senior military officers is promptly contradicted by the welter of petitions that reportedly flooded his desk from top global leaders, ranging in geographical locations from the United States, Canada, Western Europe and Australia, as well as within continental African itself. It is also quite ironic, as Professor Adu A. Boahen once pointed out, that Mr. Rawlings should make the summary execution of Gen. Acheampong the first “revolutionary” item on the agenda of his AFRC junta. Needless to say, had Gen. Acheampong been imbued with even half the level of animus which Flt.-Lt. Rawlings harbored for the former, in the wake of Mr. Rawlings’ abortive initial attempt to overthrow the so-called Supreme Military Council, the history of Ghana would be very different today and, perhaps, far better and even enviable (The Ghanaian Sphinx).

Indeed, if any group of well-meaning Ghanaians craved the blood of Generals Acheampong, Utuka, Akuffo and Afrifa, as well as the four others – and we have incontrovertible evidence that good, old Dracula was not born in Ghana – it was largely because Mr. Rawlings and his henchmen, by their inflammatory and self-righteous rhetoric, had created such a venomous and vengeful milieu. To be certain, if anything at all, no other African nation is better known for the staid and placid temperament of its people than Ghana. And so Mr. Rawlings’ facile talk about Ghanaians being so enraged in the wake of the AFRC’s pseudo-revolution as to savagely “LET THE BLOOD FLOW,” is just that, sheer bunk and cant.

And then to hear Dzelukope Jeremiah gush about “dignity” vis-à-vis the ongoing trial of Liberia’s Charles Taylor, in the Hague, makes one almost want to throw up: “I would have wished my black dignity would have been preserved, if Taylor was being tried on the black continent and not in the white man’s land.” In the white man’s land, indeed, Scottish Jerry! And if, indeed, you loath your white genes so much, why do you still call yourself “Jeremiah John Rawlings”? (I am quite sure some members of your Ewe maternal family could have Afrocentrically translated it for you). Well, you asked for it, Jato Dzelukope, so don’t blame me for promptly and squarely taking you up on your abject hypocrisy.

Finally, perhaps, some State agency ought to start investigating Monsieur Rawlings’ apparently unorthodox dealings with the Nigerians, particularly when the P/NDC proprietor calls on Abuja to play the role of Big Brother to the rest of Africa. Exactly how much was the man paid by the News Agency of Nigeria for Jato to pretend as if Ghana was never a major leader on the African continent? This is not, in any way, to suggest that Ghana’s sitting President routinely displays the kind of integrity that Mr. Rawlings cavalierly attributes to President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, particularly in the wake of Mr. Kufuor’s quite intriguing decision to bestow Ghana’s highest national order of merit, The Order of the Star of Ghana, on Prof. John Evans Atta-Mills, Acting Managing-Director of the Rawlings Corporation of the Provisional National Democratic Congress (P/NDC).

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is the author of 17 books, including “Ghanaian Politics Today” (Atumpan Publications/lulu.com, 2008). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@aol.com.