if He Wants!

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

I still find it extremely difficult to both imagine and believe that a clinically demented ethnic chauvinist like Mr. Kpegah was actually once named to sit on Ghana’s Supreme Court by either a junta leader or even a legitimately elected president of the country. I am even more flabbergasted to learn that this nation-wrecker even once schemed, albeit unsuccessfully, to be named Chief Justice of Ghana’s Supreme Court, an august judicial position of trust, poise and decency to which, unfortunately, Mr. Kpegah was briefly allowed to “play-act.” And even as my late father once bitterly lamented, Justice Kpegah’s scandalous case could aptly be likened to the vacuous gyrations that follows a dervish.
Anyway, in his latest conniption, the worst-dressed man ever to sit on the highest court of land would have his fellow partisans, tribesmen and women of the so-called National Democratic Congress (NDC) believe that “the purported[sic] meeting of regional ministers in the Ashanti Region over [the question of reconciling Messrs. Rawlings and Atta-Mills] should have taken place in the Volta Region[,] because that is where a large chunk of the party’s votes comes from” (See “Mills Hurt By Rawlings’ ‘Konongo Kaya’ Remarks” AfricaNewsAnalysis.com 4/4/12).

Actually, what Mr. Kpegah really intended to say, going by his track-record on the spewing of ethnically chauvinistic vitriol, is that the Ewe-founded NDC has absolutely no business hosting any official activities outside the Volta Region, particularly the Asante Region. Now that is all-too-predictable, coming from Mr. Kpegah, of course.
Still, what is insufferably more insulting to the intelligence of non-Volta citizens and residents of Ghana is the rather imperious implication that, somehow, the 10-percent, or so, votes that the NDC periodically garners at the polls from the “cassava-grating” region is far more valuable vis-à-vis the fortunes of the party, than any support from the rest of the other nine regions of the country. It is this kind of morally and practically regressive thinking that convinces most of us that short of a an ethnically corrective revisiting of the tenets of the 1956 United Nations-sponsored Plebiscite, perhaps the Anlo-dominated parts of the Volta Region ought to be immediately granted an autonomous status, and all ethnic Anlo-Ewes repatriated, so as to enable the rest of us Ghanaians experience the kind of political peace and stability that have eluded us for some three decades now.
For consistently and persistently, the Anlo-Ewe leaders and their “Trokosi” media operatives, largely from the southern-half of the Volta Region, have shown themselves to be constitutionally incorrigible. Otherwise, why would some Anlo-Ewe chiefs, reportedly led by their Anloga head-clansman, Togbe Sri III, have arrogated themselves the flagrantly partisan role of mediators between Messrs. Rawlings and Atta-Mills? We also witnessed the most repugnant form of treason, when the “Trokosi” nationalists and their media rearguard recently organized a hero’s welcome fiesta to celebrate the Woyome “Gorgormi” judicial heist.
In brief, for Justice Kpegah and his Anlo-Ewe clansmen and tribesmen, it well appears as if the perennial entrenchment of the so-called National Democratic Congress at all costs, and by hook and/or crook, is the only acceptable measurement of Fourth-Republican Ghanaian democracy. And in an interview that the former self-betrayed Supreme Court judge reportedly granted Radio Station XYZ (Fm 93.1), Mr. Kpegah was quoted to have asserted as follows: “I am worried because if NDC is not in power, some of us will be worse off in Ghana.” And pathetically, Mr. Kpegah’s concept of national security appears to be squarely predicated on a one-party, NDC-dominated Ghana. In other words, the fact of an Ewe-ethnic minority lording it over an Akan-ethnic majority through the sly and exploitative manipulation of an Akan-descended figurehead like President John Evans Atta-Mills, in the extortionate promotion of Anlo-Ewe chauvinism and nepotism, is all that matters.
Well, maybe Mr. Kpegah and his fellow Anlo-Ewe nationalists ought to be promptly and clearly informed that any attempt by the Anloga Boys to, once again, imperialize Ghanaians of Akan descent and our ethnic and cultural allies in the country will be met with the kind of response that would make Rwanda, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Cambodia look like an American television sitcom.
As I have already noted, if Justice Kpegah and his “Trokosi” associates find it extremely difficult to live with Ghana’s Akan ethnic majority, nothing stops them from going into exile, even as they have forced some of us to go into lifelong exile, for the fatal crime of simply being of Akan descent; or better yet, let Justice Kpegah and his Mafia clansmen petition the United Nations for a re-demarcation of the country’s Eastern border and the ceding of Anlo-Ewe lands to the Republic of Togo, even as fiercely advocated by the late President Sylvanus Olympio. For we, the Akan-Ghanaian majority, adamantly refuse to continue to be politically and culturally emasculated by less than 10-percent of the country’s citizenry.
Thirty-odd years of Anlo-Ewe domination of postcolonial Ghanaian politics must be enough. It is now time to return Ghana to democratic majority rule!
*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is Director of the Sintim-Aboagye Center for Politics and Culture and author of “Danquah v. Nkrumah: In the Words of Mahoney.” E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net.
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