By Kofi Akosah-Sarpong

All progress starts from the mind. The better the mind, the better the progress. How better the mind is driven by how serious, sophisticated, and deep the thinking is. If the society thinks poorly, its development becomes poor. This is glimpsed from the society’s intellectuals, their Big Men.

Why? Because the intellectuals, the Big Men are supposed to be the directors of progress. From USA to Europe to Southeast Asia, this has been the experience – the intellectuals, the Big Men enlightening the development process without any heavy counter-productive superstitious propaganda.

It is in such climate that the Municipal Chief Executive of Bekwai, in Ghana’s Asante Region, Noah Asante Manu is seen. Asante Manu’s assertion that the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) is using either negative “spiritualists” or the juju-marabou occult to cause the inner conflicts and the eventual destruction of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) once again reflects the brand of elites directing Ghana’s and Africa’s development.

Of particular note is Asante Manu’s claims that ex-President Jerry Rawlings, the so-called founder of NDC, who has been tormenting President Atta Mills since he came to power two years ago, though they are supposed to be from the same NDC, has spells cast on Rawlings and that “there is a” gloomy “spiritual being behind” Rawlings’ embarrassing behaviour.

How foolish can Asante Manu be in stating this in 2011, where there are advanced researches, mounting reasoning and cresting rationalization for better living globally. Asante Manu is expected to be looked up to by his municipality – as a light, as urbane development driver, as a rationalist and as a leader in reasoning from within Bekwai’s, Ghana’s and Africa’s culture and history.

Asante Manu hasn’t only disappointed his Bekwai municipality but also Ghanaians and Africans.

Asante Manu and other Ghanaian/African Big Men think like that simply because they were born into a culture part of which socializes its people, no matter their level of education and age, into believing in witchcraft, demons, devils, evil spirits, juju-marabou occult and other counter-productive superstitions.

The trouble is in Asante Manu’s brain and the culture that formed it. At the centre of Asante Manu’s brain is the skirmish between irrationality and rationality. In Asante Manu’s head, the irrational piece is ancient and thinks more with the superstitious component. The rational part of his brain is supposed to think more with the objective element of his brain.

However, because of the culture Asante Manu was born into, the irrational part of his brain has outweighed his rational part, hence his strong believe, despite his supposedly university education and maturity and travels, that Rawlings and the NDC’s internal discords are the work of evil spells cast on them by the NPP.

How low can a supposedly a Chief executive go? And how familiar is Asante Manu in the Ghanaian and African cultural and historical context. Asante Manu isn’t different from Samuel Doe (Liberia), Laurent Gbagbo (Cote d’Ivoire), Idi Amin (Uganda), Jean-Bedel Bokassa (the Central African Republic), Jerry Rawlings (Ghana) and Sani Abacha (Nigeria) who projected such wacky believes, superstitions, emotions, ideas and ways of thinking into the national and continental stage, and either blew their countries into pieces or paralysised them.

The on-going Ghana enlightenment movement will take exception to Asante Manu’s absurd thinking. Rawlings’ abysmal attitude isn’t the cause of any devil or juju-marabou spell but his appalling behaviour, parts of which come from the dysfunctional family he comes from, his long years of heavy marijuana smoking, his emotional mess and his dabbling in juju-marabou occult.

That Rawlings has disturbing mental health issues are no secret – you don’t have to be psychiatrist to know that. This is worsened as old age catches up with him and he has been transmitting this into the larger Ghanaian/African society.

No doubt, for resisting Rawlings’ attempts to command-and-control him and his presidency, President Atta Mills’ government is being disturbed constantly by the senseless Rawlings, his wife Nana Konadu and his cult of brainless tribalist, who find it difficult to rationalize Rawlings’ behaviour in relation to Ghana’s and Africa’s progress.

As much as everybody knows, elsewhere in the world, Rawlings’ behaviour, sometimes bordering on insults, instability, threats and sedition, he would have been in jail or dead.

A moral and intellectual weakling, Rawlings superstitiously believe that he is God sent and that he is the best leader Ghana has had, as his wrong-headed spiritualists and tribalistic sycophants have told him. Ghanaians know this is garbage. Kofi Busia, Hilla Limann, John Kufour and Atta Mills are far, far better, both morally and intellectually, than Rawlings.

Rawlings’s foolhardiness is as result of his being prop-up by unreasoning elites like Asante Manu, who have went to the extent of campaigning that Rawlings is “Junior Jesus.” Why and for what nobody knows!!! How unintelligent and strange!!!

It is for such ridiculous mentality that has snowballed into some sort of a culture, that Rawlings has now become a threatening albatross not only to himself, but also to President Atta Mills, the NDC and Ghanaians.

As Municipal Chief Executive of a town in Ghana, that is supposed to be the center of Africa’s emerging enlightenment movement for greater progress, Asante Manu should be ashamed of himself, drink deep from the African culture and history, read particularly what caused the European Enlightenment movement and the Asian Renaissance, relate them to Ghana and Africa, and, as the small town of Bongo, in Ghana’s Upper East Region has demonstrated, used the Bekwai Municipality as platform to enrich Ghana’s and Africa’s renaissance.