After all, Britain and Boakye-Djan Gave Us Rawlings

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

It is a fairly old news story: a former British diplomat writes a book in which he deliciously and delightfully details what Mr. Craig Murray claims to have been his country’s quite significant contribution to the auspicious liquidation of the 19-year stranglehold of the Scottish-sired Flt.-Lt. Jerry John Rawlings on Ghanaian political culture (See “How Britain Helped NPP Win Elections” Peacefmonline.com 9/15/10; also, “Tony Aidoo Castigates Britain for Aiding NPP Win Election 2000” Ghanaweb.com 9/15/20).

There is some evidentiary veracity to the story although, as ought to be naturally expected, many a key operative of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) finds it rather too embarrassing to acknowledge the same. Nonetheless, the fact of the matter is that only clinical idiots really believe that Ghana’s erstwhile colonial mistress completely gave up all power and influence over the nation that Britain had almost singularly created out of a mélange of loosely organized polities on the eve of March 6, 1957, when President Kwame Nkrumah rather naively and exuberantly declared: “Ghana is free forever!”

To his credit, Nkrumah does not appear to have been altogether naïve about the new relatively subtle phase of Britain’s neocolonialist stranglehold on the affairs of her former colonial possessions, thus his creative coining of the now routinely used term of “neocolonialism” as the last stage of imperialism. The fact of the matter is that imperialism is too fundamentally inherent, and innate, to human nature for it to have any last stage or phase. It is a corporate game of cooptation in which those mischievously parochial enough to envisage the possible staking out of an autarky get mercilessly swallowed up in the process. This appears to have partly been the problem of Mr. Nkrumah, when he rather presumptuously decided to take his new sovereign polity out of the neocolonial phase of British imperialism – the so-called British Commonwealth of Nations.

He would obliquely, and perhaps even completely inadvertently, be reminded by Lt.-Gen. Akwasi Amankwaa Afrifa that even the Asantes who more fiercely fought the British colonial imperialist than all else in the West African sub-region, even appreciated something organically insuperable about the fast-encroaching geopolitical phenomenon of globalization. Back on February 24, 1966, however, Gen. Afrifa must have sounded absurdly naïve to many an anti-imperialist scholar and/or intellectual.

We know that the chapter of Mr. Murray’s book titled The Catholic Orangemen of Togo and Other Conflicts I Have Known has a chunky modicum of veracity, because even Mr. Dan Botwe of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), who was the party’s general-secretary at the time, claims to have personally seen and recognized Mr. Murray at the headquarters of Ghana’s Electoral Commission in the company of Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan, the Electoral Commissioner, as reportedly asserted by the retired British diplomat in his aforementioned book. Mr. Botwe also effortlessly confirms that Mr. Murray had, indeed, been present in the strong-room of the headquarters of the Electoral Commission with NPP stalwarts like the witness himself. We also know full-well that either as a result of slavo-colonial dementia or clinical inferiority complex or both, Ghanaians tend to ravenously crave the friendship and moral validation of the Western-European man, particularly the White-Man of the British Isles. Else, what was a foreigner and non-citizen like Mr. Murray, diplomat or laity, doing in the strong-room of the Electoral Commission in the tense moments before the declaration of the winner of Election 2000?

The same canker can be embarrassingly envisaged in the servile and morally bankrupt manner in which Ghanaians welcomed the faux-Scottish sounding Mr. Rawlings when the latter first appeared, almost ex-nihilo, on the Ghanaian political scene on June 4, 1979 and, again, on December 31, 1981. In the former instance, we would shortly learn that the man who had actually led the 1979 putsch and the only university-educated player among the June 4th mutineers, then-Capt. Boakye-Djan, had felt either too diffident and/or unequal to the task and had therefore promptly deferred to the European-sounding and looking Flt.-Lt. Jerry John Rawlings in the specious name of the latter’s being more charismatic than all else. The fact of the matter is that here, too, the operative term was inferiority-complex. Today, the so-called Osabarima (Chief-Warrior) Boakye-Djan is a card-carrying member of the Rawlings-founded National Democratic Congress making waves about his intention of succeeding the very man that he has been maligning for at least a decade now! What is clear, in no uncertain terms, is the impressively unmistakable fact that the proverbial British imperialist knows his former fawning Ghanaian subject far better than the latter may credibly claim to know him-/herself.

Where the story verges on the purely fabulous is the Tony Aidoo-minted narrative that, somehow, Mr. Rawlings had during his 19-year stranglehold on Ghanaian politics so advanced the nation’s economy that it had had to take gratuitous detractors from Britain and the Netherlands to sabotage the same, and thus invidiously deny a well-deserved presidential election victory to Prof. John Evans Atta-Mills. Indeed, if Britain and the Netherlands had played any major role in the 2000 presidential election victory of Mr. John Agyekum-Kufuor, then, needless to say, these two Western countries ought to be in line to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

And just why do I say this? I say this because the ineffably lackluster performance of the Mills-Mahama administration makes one wonder why the same putsch-suspects had not rushed, once again, to the rescue of the Akufo-Addo-led NPP in Election 2008. We think we know the answer: so badly had the Kufuor-led NPP government performed as to make the Cash-and-Carry P/NDC regime seem like an ideal purveyor of the typical European welfare state that any patent attempt at external intervention may well have culminated in a popular uprising in favor of P/NDC-brewed pseudo-socialism.

*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 “Ghanaian Politics Today” (Lulu.com, 2008). E-mail: [email protected]. ###