Opinions of Sunday, 13 November 2016

Columnist: Okoampa-Ahoofe, Kwame

Konadu’s forked tongue

Nana Konadu Agyeman Rawlings, Flag bearer of the National Democratic Party (NDP) Nana Konadu Agyeman Rawlings, Flag bearer of the National Democratic Party (NDP)

The original title of this article was “Konadu And Visionary Leadership Are Polar Opposites.” But I decided to go with the one above this article after I read a news report captioned “Nana Konadu Outlines Vision for Economy; Promises Massive Job Creation” (Ghanaweb.com 10/25/15). In the latter news item, the longest-reigning first lady was reported to have conferred with some queen-mothers of the Central Region and outlined her vision for the country.

This is rather amusing because Chairman Jerry John Rawlings’ wife for some two decades wantonly exploited Ghanaian women, under the guise of the 31st December Women’s Movement (DWM), to filthily enrich her family and herself by shipping all her children abroad to some of the most expensive colleges and universities, while the Satanic Couple played peek-a-boo with Ghanaian public higher education.

You see, the problem that Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings has with pushing her irreparably blighted agenda is that since her husband officially exited the national political scene, she has spent most of her time incessantly castigating the purportedly gross incompetence of the leaders of the very political machine founded by her husband, namely, the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC).

The last time that she had anything to do with anybody from the Central Region, it was at the party’s National Congress in Sunyani, the Brong-Ahafo regional capital. And that was in 2010. And her sole objective was to unseat then presidential incumbent, Prof. John Evans Atta-Mills, late, so as to occupy the helm of the National Democratic Congress.

Back then, her one and only agenda was to clinch the presidency so as to enable her to summarily round up and jail as many of the former members of the Kufuor-led government of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), in retaliation for President Kufuor’s due process prosecution and imprisonment of those self-righteous “revolutionaries” who had either embezzled the Ghanaian taxpayer’s money or deliberately and criminally caused financial loss to the State, as possible.

Among the Akan, there is a maxim that runs as follows: “If Mrs. Naked promises you a bolt of cloth, you just listen to her name.” Mrs. Konadu Rawlings has absolutely nothing constructive, by way of policy initiatives, to offer the nation any more than President John Dramani Mahama, the man her husband personally handpicked and mentored, has to for the development of the country. For instance, the founding-proprietor of the so-called National Democratic Party (NDP) told the queen-mothers of the Central Region whom she met that she intended to drastically reduce the number of “ridiculous” taxes imposed on cash-strapped Ghanaians by the Mahama government.

However, within the same breath, Nana Konadu also promised to widen the tax net to capture more taxpayers or, as she eerily and mischievously put it, “widen the tax net and tap into the incredible potential of our workers.”

In other words, the NDP’s two-time abortive presidential candidate actually intends to burden the average Ghanaian civil servant with more taxes than what has already been imposed on the latter by her husband’s former surrogate. She also says that she intends to remove all the bottlenecks bedeviling the economy and create an enabling environment to strengthen industrial growth, but she does not tell her audiences precisely how she intends to do so, especially when all the available records scandalously indicate that she was part of the National Democratic Congress’ team of nation-wreckers that unconscionably dismantled the erstwhile Ghana Industrial Holdings Corporation (GIHOC), and quartered up the state-owned factories bunched up under the label of GIHOC among themselves and their cronies.

Mrs. Rawlings also says that she intends to reduce rampant power outages to the barest minimum possible but, here again, all the available evidence points to the fact that for nearly 20 years she was a key player in a government headed by her own husband that did a diddly little to stem the unhealthy tide of power outages, thereby causing countless numbers of businesses to go under. I have said this time and again that Nana Konadu is the least qualified of all the candidates vying for legitimate occupancy of the flagstaff House. She also has a track-record of violent vindictiveness, ranging from meting Identification Haircuts to the boyfriends and lovers of the Rawlings girls who dared to end their relationships with the “Satanic Daughters,” to summarily arresting and jailing journalists who wrote articles and news reports critical of the bloody couple.

But even more significantly, Mrs. Rawlings’ arrogant sense of proprietary entitlement makes her absolutely unfit to occupy the most powerful political position in the land – my profuse apologies to Mrs. Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton. Plus, the fact that other than theatrically playing photo-op First Lady, Nana Konadu has absolutely no practical political experience, having held no elective office for any remarkable temporal span.

*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs