Kenya Spotlight: Is Ghana's President Mahama A Neo-Nazi Or A Statesman?

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Dec. 19, 2014
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

President John Dramani Mahama continues to predictably and steadily embarrass and disappoint his countrymen and women whenever the occasion calls for equanimous leadership and constructive engagement with the rule of ethics and justice. On his recent three-day official visit to Nairobi, Kenya's capital, the Ghanaian leader was widely reported to have heartily congratulated his "Dear Brother" President Uhuru Kenyatta for scandalously dodging a well-deserved judicial bullet from the Hague-based International Criminal Court (ICC) - (See "Mahama Endorses ICC's Dropped Charges Against Kenyatta" Citifmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 12/14/14).

And on the latter score, it bears briefly recalling that in its decision to drop its human-rights-violation and crimes-against-humanity charges against President Kenyatta, who also happens to be the son of the East African nation's first postcolonial leader, Mzee Jomo Kenyatta, the ICC cited largely the problem of logistics, and absolutely not the fact that no crimes had been committed in the aftermath of Kenya's 2007 widespread post-election violence that could be directly linked to the younger Mr. Kenyatta. The ICC did not also claim to have rescinded the forensic legitimacy of its initial indictment of the Kenyan leader.

And yet, here was Ghana's President Mahama rubbing chili-pepper into the wounds and memories of the family members, friends and relatives of the politically slain, and patting the back of Mr. Kenyatta and rather vacuously and pathetically quoting President Kwame Nkrumah to unseasonably justify the patently untenable, as follows: "'We [Africans] prefer self-government with danger to servitude in tranquility,' and it is in this spirit of daring determination of the African people to be the controllers of their own destiny."

I don't quite get where the brutal massacre of some 1,200 defenseless Kenyan citizens and civilians by their own leaders and fellow Africans, a half-century after the removal of the British colonialist, has any meaningful connection with the fierce struggle of the African people against Western imperialism in the 1950s and 60s. If anything at all, the 2007 post-election massacre in Kenya clearly impugns the entire notion and objective of African self-rule. It is almost as if in being colonized and geopolitically dominated by Western Europeans, the African people had actually been protected against internecine savagery.

Indeed, the very bloody political record of Ghana's President Kwame Nkrumah heart-wrenchingly betrays the legendary Show Boy's anti-colonial pontifical pronouncements, even as Nigeria's President Nnamdi Azikiwe was to poignantly observe in the wake of Nkrumah's prison assassination of Dr. J. B. Danquah, the former's magnanimous political mentor, in February 1965.

I also don't get what he so strenuously sought to imply, when President Mahama rather recklessly gushed to his "Dear Brother" President Uhuru Kenyatta that he, the Ghanaian leader, like his extant Kenyan counterpart, had been privileged, like Messrs. Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta, to "rekindle the lights that led us and our people to freedom as sovereign nations."

To be certain, about the only "lights" that those of us avid students and observers of the politics of the two nations have witnessed Messrs. Mahama and Kenyatta "rekindle" were the massive rigging of the electoral processes - or the ballot - in the two countries, as well as the blatant complicity of the Supreme Court in both countries with the unholy causes of the culprits. And so clearly, President Mahama may have been inaugurating a new brotherhood of criminal African politicians when he so shamelessly congratulated President Kenyatta for callously ordering the Mafia-style execution of some 1,200 defenseless civilians and suavely getting away with the same.

Here in Ghana, of course, the mysterious liquidation of Mr. Mahama's former boss and predecessor, President John Evans Atta-Mills, has yet to be fully investigated and publicly explained.

______________________________________________________________