And you, too, Mr. Rawlings?!

It is rather risible for the man who meticulously and systematically supervised the assassination of Akan-Ghanaian Supreme Court judges, as well as hundreds of thousands of other innocents, to be calling for “thorough investigations” into the Anlo chieftaincy hostilities that culminated in the deaths of five people, including a police officer who had been detailed to help maintain peace and order, in order to ensure the prevalence of “lasting peace” among the Anlo people.

That such call on the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) is coming from the man who has self-righteously given more grief to far more Ghanaians than any other military or civilian ruler, constitutes the very height of arrogance and unpardonable ethnic chauvinism (Ghanaweb.com 4/13/08).

Exactly what does Mr. Rawlings mean, for example, by asserting that the “Anlos of today reflect the same qualities that motivated their forebears to disengage themselves from the tyrannical rule of Togbui Agorkoli at Notsie and migrated to the present location”?

The preceding is not clear primarily because whatever Togbui Agorkoli, the infamous patriarch of the Anlo people, visited on Mr. Rawlings’ tribesmen and women as to compel them to relocate themselves among the Guan and Akan people of present-day Ghana, among a host of other sub-nationalities, of course, does not seem to have been healthily eviscerated or exorcised. In fact, it incontrovertibly appears as if in relocating, the Anlos have, ironically, exported the selfsame wickedness that they had, allegedly, foresworn.

Consequently, for “lasting peace” to reign among the Anlo people, the proper prescriptive remedy appears to be “a thorough moral, spiritual, psychical and psychological” self-examination rather than having Mr. Kufuor’s government expend our scarce monetary and human resources pursuing the illusive and elusive demons of Notsie, wherever the latter radical township is located.

For the rest of us Ghanaians to whom the Anlo people, shepherded by their tribal overlord, Mr. Jeremiah John Rawlings, have virtually constituted nothing short of an incessant plague, or even an apocalyptic pestilence, perhaps our best option out of this perennial scourge is to have the pro-Rawlings faction of the Anlo sub-nationality find their way back home to Notsie, where it all began, as it were. After all, in the “Cosa Nostra” parlance of the Italian Mafia, however tyrannical the regime of Togbui Agorkoli might have been, it had still been immutably organic to the political culture of the Anlo people.

And believe you me, were the pro-Rawlings faction of the “Anlo-Diaspora” to decide on a return trip, we would gladly oblige to “thoroughly” buy them out of their landed property at the maximum of a mutually-determined reasonable price!

And so it is rather curious, if also patently absurd, for Mr. Rawlings to insist on his faction of the Anlo sub-nationality being unreservedly accorded the kind of “lasting peace” which they were roundly, and perhaps even condignly, denied by their own patriarch, Togbui Agorkoli. And to be certain, if yours truly were in the “Afro-Moses” or “Tar-Beetle” sandals of Togbui Agorkoli and had to contend with such morally depraved urchins like Messrs. Rawlings and Tsikata, he, definitely, would have vigorously and hermetically pursued the same course of tyrannical monarchical culture.

It is also rather ironic, albeit quite predictable, that at the very moment that Mr. Kofi Humado, the Provisional National Democratic Congress’ (P/NDC) Member of Parliament for the Anlo district, was passionately and patriotically exhorting his people to quickly “put the past behind them,” Mr. Rawlings was stridently attempting to scapegoat President Kufuor for the primal tyrannical crimes of Togbui Agorkoli, all of which leaves the keen observer of P/NDC political culture wondering if the party’s sole proprietor and professional coup-plotter is not, once again, up to his trademark mischief.

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing. He is the author of 15 books, including “Abe: Reflections on Love,” “Romantic Explorations” and “Abena Anin’waa: Letters to My Daughter” (Atumpan Publications/lulu.com, 2008), his most recent volumes of poetry. E-mail: [email protected].