Professor Mills, This Joke is not Funny!

On the 51st anniversary of Ghana’s independence, the presidential candidate of the opposition National Democratic Congress took his infamous circus act to the Asante-Regional metropolis of Kumasi. His message was simple; and it was that in the opinion of Prof. John Evans Atta-Mills, the average Ghanaian voter is a dupe, one who is all-too-susceptible to being hoodwinked in the candidate’s megalomaniacal bid to extorting the sacred mandate of the voter. And this largely explains the so-called door-to-door campaign embarked upon by the former Legon Law School lecturer.

Interestingly, as mentioned elsewhere earlier on, Dzelukope Jeremiah’s handpicked NDC flagbearer has yet to explain why it took Prof. Atta-Mills a whopping 12 years to embark on his door-to-door campaign strategy. And, of course, he really does not need to explain his gimmickry; for it has “desperation” boldly written all over it. And a desperate politician is the most dangerous of his kind.

On the face of it, his academic title, of professor, and other credentials appear to render the former tax commissioner the ideal candidate to speak to the critical, cultural issue of the country’s academic and professional development. But, of course, his damnable record of having trucked with the most anti-intellectual government in postcolonial Ghanaian history readily gives the lie to such hypocritical pretense. For under the government of the P/NDC, Ghanaian education, hitherto the best of its kind on the Continent, was callously and deliberately malnourished – in terms of capital and material resources – to the extent of rendering our flagship academies mere nominal representatives of their kind.

But, perhaps, more significantly, the Ghanaian electorate needs to be reminded of the fact of the P/NDC having shuttered our universities and colleges far, far longer than any other postcolonial Ghanaian government.

According to a Ghana News Agency report that carried Prof. Atta-Mills’ Kumasi rally, “The NDC…views education in general as the pivot around which the nation’s socioeconomic and political growth revolves” (Ghanaweb.com 3/6/08).

The preceding is rather difficult to believe, because as recently as barely four years ago, Kenya’s Prof. Ali A. Mazrui told the story of Mr. Rawlings angrily lamenting the mass exodus of Ghanaian academics and professionals during the tenure of the P/NDC. Prof. Mazrui had met the former Ghanaian strongman somewhere in Germany where the afore-referenced conversation had taken place.

And being one hardly known to mince words, Prof. Mazrui promptly and bluntly, albeit politely, let Dzelukope Jeremiah know that if, indeed, the self-righteous pseudo-revolutionary deemed himself to reserve the right to hog and peremptorily dictate the terms and use of Ghana’s political space, then it equally could hardly be gainsaid that Ghanaian professionals and academics also reserved the right not to be ordered about at whim by Dzelukope Jay.

A vintage dictator of the fascist kind that “J. J.” was, as Prof. Mazrui implicitly noted, the former Ghanaian strongman insisted that no Ghanaian academic or professional reserved the right to vote with his/her feet, in view of the fact that the latter’s extensive training had been heavily subsidized by the taxpayer’s money. The ever-astute Prof. Mazrui deliberately left out the punch line, which was that neither had the Ghanaian taxpayer who wholly funded Dzelukope Jeremiah’s extensive, as well as expensive, military training anticipated that this clinical basket case would emerge from the Ghana Air Force Academy to criminally role-play a major Ghanaian politician.

Indeed, when Prof. Atta-Mills asserts, rather cavalierly, that: “We are living in a country where thousands of our able-bodied men are languishing [sic] on [sic] the streets without any aim due to bad economic policies,” he actually shoots the P/NDC and the very credibility of his own candidacy in the foot, as it were. For the picture portrayed by the foregoing quote quite eerily and strikingly recalls that which prevailed in the country in 1998, when Prof. Atta-Mills was substantive “Vice”-President of Ghana. Back then, when yours truly visited the country, the going concern among the same able-bodied youth that Prof. Atta-Mills now unctuously presumes to represent was selling dog-chains and rotten apples at major urban-traffic intersections!

Perhaps, he would have put himself in a far better light if the former “Vice”-President had presented comprehensive statistical evidence to shore up his dubious contention, regarding the number and value of jobs created for Ghanaian youth under the protracted tenure of the P/NDC. Was the massive, below-market sale of GIHOC part of such job creation?

But for its criminal mendacity, Prof. Atta-Mills’ promise of reviving “defunct state-owned enterprises [in order] to help create jobs for the masses” if voted into power, would have been nothing short of the irrepressibly comical.

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English and Journalism at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is the author of 13 books, including “Abe: Reflections on Love”(Atumpan Publications/lulu.com, 2008), a collection of poetry. E-mail: okoampaahoofe@aol.com.

Views expressed by the author(s) do not necessarily reflect those of GhanaHomePage.