*By Akadu Ntiriwa Mensema, Ph. D.

Accra, Feb. 18, GNA - Nana Darkwa, a panelist on a morning show at an Accra-based radio station, has been arrested for alleging that last Sunday's fire that gutted the Ridge residence of former President Jerry John Rawlings was deliberate.

Culture of silence
Relentless silence
That scared sacred bats
Bats comforting trees at 37 Hospital
Silence
That killed our friendliness
In taxis, trotros
In JJ’s articulators of the 80s & 90s
At Makola where traders feared to smile
Smile with customers
In the Stadium supporters feared to cheer
At weddings in-laws feared in-laws
Culture of silence
That floored old Arkaah’s tongue

Thousand jails for JJ Rawlings
The encyclopedia of deceit, delusions
From a man who has wrong answers

JJ’s wrong answers to all our fires
Fires of violence
Fires of deprivation
Fires of corruption
Fires of brutalization
Fires of “tribalism”

But JJ is a free man
Born-ing dogs
Romancing fire on Valentine’s Day
But jailing those who talk about fire

Rawlings’ deceitful answers
Shed tears of deceit
About the slaughtering of the Judges
About the Fire-ing of the Judges
JJ blamed imperialist forces
Those forces his kinsmen
And JJ knew it beforehand

JJ has had impulsive divisive answers:
Serial killing of women
Ya-Na’s death
Armed robbery
Liman’s government
Kufour’s government
Mills’ government
That Nkrumah did nothing
That Nkrumah only signed documents

But Rawlings is free, walking free
Encyclopedia of deceit, delusions

Culture of silence
Forced us to foam with our laughter
Choreographing silence as we mourned
The slaughtering, fire-ing of the Judges
The fire-bombing of Col. Enniful
Death squads
That roamed the night
To arrest whispers of our despair
Curfews suffocated our oxygen of ideas

JJ is free like fire ridging plains

Press freedom lost
Human excreta bombing of media houses
Human excreta
JJ’s weapon of choice
Carried, smelt, and massaged with grace
By JJ and his minions of sycophants
And seizing toilets, that is
To entomb anyone with a voice
Voices of dissent, that is

A sociopath in our generous midst
To silence us
Rawlings does all the barking
Of telling Ghanaians he knows it all
But couldn’t provide answers in 20 years
Demonized Kufour
As Atta Ayi, armed robber
Tensions that stop our faith in our voices
Dissonance in our multiple voices

Today
Rawlings, the man who born dogs
Flea-diseased dogs, of rabid dogs
Bastardizing Mills’ ministers
Of slow-snail Mills milling around
Of coward Mills
Of thievery ministers
Of who born dogs

But Rawlings is walking free
Roaming freely on Valentine’s Fire Day

Atta Mills
Law Prof at loss
Choreographing the barking of a dog
Basking in a fire set for dogs
Fire in Mills’ mind
Fire on Mills’ mind
Consumed
By he who born rabid dogs
By he who never sets fire
But lives by fire, lives with fire
Mills free us
From the dogs of rabid politics
From the fires of gloom and doom

*Akadu N. Mensema, Ph. D., is a nationalist Denkyira beauty. She is a trained oral historian cum sociologist and Professor in the USA. She lives in Pennsylvania with her great mentor and teaches Africa-area studies at a college in Maryland. In her pastime, she writes what critics have called “populist hyperbolic, satirical” poetry. She can be reached at akadumensema@yahoo.com