Mills and Rawlings are Mirror Images

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

The story appeared in the Ghanaian Statesman’s Dec. 22, 2008 edition; and it was captioned “Kwesi Pratt: ‘Prof. Mills is every inch like Mr. Rawlings.” Perhaps it would have been better titled “Prof. Mills is Every Bit like Mr. Rawlings,” or “Prof. Mills is the Mirror Image” of Dzelukope Jato.

In the wake of the Dec. 7 presidential election deadlock, the retired Legon law school professor was widely, albeit unofficially, reported to have told the chiefs and people of Cape Coast, the traditional Fante and old Ghanaian capital, that electing him president would be a glorious first for the Fante sub-nation, and that being consistently rejected by the Central Region unmistakably, if also unpalatably, implied that, somehow, there was something wrong with having a Fante as Ghana’s president.

What the notorious Identification Haircut Peacenik deliberately failed to add is that Prof. John Evans Atta-Mills is not just any ordinary Fante or, more to the point, a Fante of great, or remarkable, integrity and moral rectitude. Rather, what we have in the Elmina-born Prof. Atta-Mills is an imperious, supercilious and self-righteous and unconscionable collaborator of Mr. Rawlings and the Tsikatas.

What is also intriguing is that while he vehemently protested the recent divestiture – or sale – of the poorly performing Ghana Telecom, to the British company Vodafone, by the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) government, Prof. Atta-Mills had gaily and actively participated in the total dismantling of the erstwhile Ghana Industrial Holdings Corporation (GIHOC) and the deliberate rendering of some 300,000 Ghanaian workers unemployed. And so it is unpardonably hypocritical for the same man to be criticizing the NPP for woeful dearth of job-creation avenues when, in fact, all that he had done during his 19 long years of collaborating with the nation-wrecking Mr. Rawlings was to sink even more Ghanaians below the poverty line.

The problem, though, is that while Mr. Kwesi Pratt does not appear to wield much credibility vis-à-vis the subject of unprecedented P/NDC atrocities, for he has publicly and shamelessly trucked, hand-in-glove, with this barbarous and cannibalistic political juggernaut, the fact remains that truth, even proclaimed from the drooling lips of the forked-tongued and pathologically opportunistic, cannot be readily and rationally contradicted.

The great irony is that under the Rawlings-Mills tenure, both the country’s judicial system and education sank to their lowest levels, and Prof. Mills proudly boasts of being a formidable legal mind and a talented and astute educator. Thus when Mr. Pratt, in an editorial which appeared in the latter’s Insight newspaper’s edition of April 19-25, 2000, asserts that: “The emergence of Professor John Atta Mills as the presidential candidate of the National Democratic Congress will not change anything in the party,” this fellow clansman must know exactly what he is talking about.

For our part, we make bold to pertinently add that not only would an Atta-Mills presidency offer absolutely nothing redeeming to the bloody human rights record and socially disruptive mind-set of subscribers to the neo-communist ideology of the NDC, but even more significantly, it would irreparably supervise the regression of the admirable and remarkable socio-cultural and quality-of-life gains registered by the Kufuor government of the ruling New Patriotic Party. Under an Atta-Mills presidency, no doubt, human rights would, decidedly and eerily, become passé, as a riotous open-season of abductions and gangland-style executions become the staple political diet.

Interestingly, though, it was squarely on account of his purported acceptance of an IMF/World Bank structural adjustment program package for Ghana, that Mr. Rawlings violently ousted Dr. Hilla Limann’s Nkrumah-leaning People’s National Party (PNP) on December 31, 1981. Ironically, the P/NDC would “distinguish” itself throughout the 1980s and 1990s by cynically and hypocritically collaborating with the same IMF/World Bank operatives in order to “structurally adjust” the Ghanaian economy into abject and total bankruptcy and thoroughgoing stasis. And so, of course, it is for the preceding reasons why electing Prof. Atta-Mills president would be the greatest catastrophe Ghanaians ever plunged themselves into, since the callous invention of the “Rawlings Necklace.”

*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 the author of 18 books, including “Dr. J. B. Danquah: Architect of Modern Ghana” (iUniverse.com, 2005). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@aol.com.