By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
July 6, 2015
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

The propaganda machine operatives of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) always find cheap and trashy ways of putting the key operatives of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) on the defensive. I don't know how and where they learned such dirty tricks, except to admit with good humor and wistful admiration that they do it inimitably well. I am here, of course, talking about the decision by the high-powered members of the NPP delegation to bare their chests, in consonance with traditional practice, before the spiritual leader of the Talensi Traditional Area in the township of Tindana.

Initial media reports gave me the confusing impression that "Tindana" was either the skin-name or title of the Paramount Chief of Talensi itself. Whatever be the case, the vicious attempt by the NDC's operatives, led by the cross-dressing Mr. Johnson Asiedu-Nketia, popularly known as "General Mosquito," the party's general-secretary, to slap a "ritual" stigma and an electoral jinx on these respecters of Ghanaian traditions and culture will not wash (See "We Also Went To Tindana But Never Took Off Our Clothes - Asiedu-Nketia" MyJoyOnline.com / Ghanaweb.com 7/6/15).

If anything at all, the Communications Directorate of the New Patriotic Party, headed by Nana Akomea, ought to be capitalizing on this show of reverence for authority to convincingly demonstrate to the people of Talensi, and Ghanaians at large, why President John Dramani Mahama has for so long kept them out of the GYEEDA and SUBAH loop or development resources. Instead, we find these handsome and fleshy half-naked men in their prime desperately soliciting the assistance of the spokesperson of the "Tindana," or Talensi, spiritual leader to explain their all-too-appropriate deportment to their cynical detractors of the National Democratic Congress.

If Mr. Asiedu-Nketia and his notorious posse of culturally disrespectful goons did not follow established protocol by baring their chests before courting audience with the Tindana-of-Talensi, if I may be permitted the use of such expression, this was clearly in synch with the behavioral notoriety of the key operatives of the Rawlings-minted National Democratic Congress. After all, isn't their founding-father globally known to be the Architect of Ghanaian Disrespect? But, of course, we can also decide to give these perpetual urchins the proverbial benefit of the doubt by chalking their display of abject disrespect of the Tindana to be purely borne out of ignorance, rather than arrogance.

As for General Mosquito's outrageous accusation that the leaders of the NPP have a hypocritical tendency to appropriating Christian scriptures as a smokescreen while covertly resorting to "voodoo" rituals, it is simply just that - a scandalous and morally rancid and untenable accusation. Indeed, were he a studious student of the Bible or Christian precepts, Mr. Asiedu-Nketia would have readily recalled Jesus' exhorting his apostles, disciples and even detractors to "Give unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and to God what belongs to the Divine Godhead." Of course, it would be stretching matters unnecessarily to expect somebody who prays to Karl Marx and Chairman Mao facing Beijing/Peking to be privy to the preceding paraphrasal quote.

In essence, what has been globally exposed is not the alleged addiction of the key NPP operatives to organic and salutary indigenous Ghanaian/African culture, but the pathological alienation and cultural self-denigration of cynical "Afropean" politicians like Messrs. Asiedu-Nketia and Kofi Adams, the piranha-mouthed National Organizer of the National Democratic Congress.

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