Bugri Naabu Is Absolutely Right About Rawlings

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

His admirers and supporters and fans may not like to hear this, but Mr. Daniel Bugri Naabu, the Northern Regional Chairman of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), is spot on when he describes former President Jerry John Rawlings as the most corrupt leader in Ghana's postcolonial history (See "Rawlings Was Ghana's Most Corrupt President - Bugri Naabu" Citifmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 5/23/14).

Indeed, he is the most corrupt Ghanaian leader because, to-date, there is no verifiable record of Mr. Rawlings' annual salary and perks during the 11-year period that he dominated the country's political landscape and culture as a de facto dictator in Eyademaian and Mobutuian mode. About the only other postcolonial Ghanaian ruler with the same record of salary unaccountability was the country's first Prime Minister and President, Mr. Kwame Nkrumah. The celebrated Jibowu Commission scandal revelations effectively tarnished the image and record of the Show Boy as a wantonly profligate leader who envisaged the Bank of Ghana as his piggybank, as well as his personal wallet.

Nkrumah was also not averse to doling out huge sums of taxpayers' hard-earned monetary currency to his cronies and associates without recourse for parliamentary approval. Thus Dr. J. B. Danquah was not far from the objective truth, when the Doyen of Gold Coast and Ghanaian Politics described his arch-nemesis and former political understudy as the eerily striking equivalent of an eighteenth-century French monarch who envisaged himself to be functionally synonymous with the State.

For Jerry-The-Terrible, corruption manifested itself in the form of his unconscionable and summary destruction of the country's economy and industrial base by callously quartering up the erstwhile Ghana Industrial Holdings Corporation (GIHOC) among his cronies and associates; and some critics even claim that most of the "divested" GIHOC properties were actually "diverted" by Mr. Rawlings to members of his family, often using the Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings-chaperoned 31st December Women's Movement (DWM) as an entrepreneurial facade in the ravenous acquisition of factories, real estate and other landed properties.

And by the way, it was Mr. Rawlings who established and ratified the kleptocratic tradition of selling state-owned properties, particularly residential properties at giveaway or "donkomi" prices to inner-circle members of his government, including Mr. Ebo Tawiah, the former cabinet member of the erstwhile so-called Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC). The latter fact was widely and publicly acknowledged by the Wood-presided Supreme Court of Ghana, in the matter of The People Versus Jake Obetsebi-Lamptey.

And so it is rather laughable to hear some of his most ardent and fanatical supporters vacuously pontificate about how Mr. Rawlings has not been personally found to have indulged in acts of grand larceny against the State. The fact of the matter is that Togbui Avaklasu, during his 19 years of abject misrule, 11 of them being decidedly a reign-of-terror or state-sponsored terrorism, Mr. Rawlings caused the brutal assassination of Supreme Court judges and effectively traumatized the entire judiciary and irreparably compromised state security agencies that it continues to be extremely difficult, if not downright impossible, to get our investigative institutions to boldly expose the epically criminal acts of theft and corruption that occurred under Togbui Avaklasu's watch.

If his reckless and noetic regression of the development of private entrepreneurship in the country, under the specious guise of "Social Democracy" or "Democratic Socialism," is not a forensically sustainable mark of abject corruption, then I sincerely don't know what else Ghanaians ought to be talking about whenever the painful and bloody subject of the morally and economically bleak tenure of Jerry-The-Terrible comes up for public discussion. Then again, who is the real father of HIPC? And who invented the "Rawlings Necklace"? The fact of the matter is that Chairman Rawlings has caused the wanton destruction of the lives of more innocent, unsuspecting and hardworking Ghanaian citizens than any other leader since 1957.

Chairman Rawlings also has yet to account for the schooling of his children in some of the most expensive academies both at home and abroad, even as he cavalierly caused the rampant and summary closures of the country's institutions of higher learning and destroyed the futures of hundreds of thousands of Ghanaian youths. And yes, you may choose to call Mr. Naabu any abominable name in the proverbial book; but "a congenital buffoon" is definitely not one of them. Such label indisputably belongs to his detractors, particularly those Boko Haram Fanatics who are hell-bent on sanitizing the pathogically rascally Togbui Avaklasu beyond recognition.

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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
Board Member, The Nassau Review
May 23, 2014
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
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