Bring It On, Mr. Mahama!

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

The Ghana News Agency (GNA) on Friday, Sept. 12, 2008, reported the running-mate of the flagbearer of the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) to be bitterly complaining of New Patriotic Party hostility towards the supporters of the NDC in Kyebi, the traditional capital of Akyem-Abuakwa and home turf of Nana Addo-Dankwa Akufo-Addo.

What rankles this writer, however, is Mr. John Dramani Mahama’s hypocritical attempt to fault the NPP Presidential Candidate for what appears to have been purely a visceral reaction of ordinary Kyebi townsfolk to perennial atrocities perpetrated against them by leading operatives of the NDC during the two protracted decades that the pseudo-civilian P/NDC governments held Ghanaians, literally, by our scruff. Thus by his rather cynical remark, it is almost as if the Bole-Bamboi NDC-Member of Parliament curiously expects the ordinary citizens of Kyebi, in particular, and the people of Ghana, in general, to pretend that notorious politicians like Mr. Mahama have had any meaningful trucking, or business, to do with democratic culture, or governance, during the twenty infernal years that the former information minister and the P/NDC dominated our national political landscape.

Needless to say, it takes quite a remarkable modicum of chutzpah – or shamelessness – for the man best known and associated with the lurid and outright savage practice of “shit-bombing” to be presuming to aptly play the role of an authoritative political historian of the ruling New Patriotic Party. Thus, for instance, Mr. Mahama could self-righteously observe that “in 1996 when NDC members of the Abuakwa-South Constituency hoisted miniature flags of the party on Royal Palm Trees at Kyebi, supporters of Nana Akufo-Addo went round to remove them” (see “Mahama Challenges Akuffo [sic] Addo” (Ghanaweb.com 9/12/08).

As a self-proclaimed NPP political historian, needless to say, it would have been far more meaningful for the Bole-Bamboi parliamentarian to have equally vocally regaled his audience at the Koforidua Polytechnic Institute with the far more edifying story of exactly how the Kyebi Royal Palm Trees came to be cultivated and nurtured for as long as these distinctive landmarks have become renowned and globally associated with Kyebi township. Needless to say, if he had thoroughly and meticulously done his homework, Prof. Atta-Mills’ presidential campaign lieutenant would have learned to his humbling sobriety that the last thing that the architect-cultivator of the Royal Palm Trees and the people of Kyebi want posted on their unique landmarks are the bloody photographs of the certified butchers and terrorists of the so-called Provisional National Democratic Congress (P/NDC). In sum, the Bole-Bamboi NDC-MP ought to be taught the difference between a bulletin board and the Kyebi Royal Palm Trees.

Somebody also needs to recall for the benefit of the conveniently amnesiac running-mate of the NDC flagbearer, as well as Ghanaians who may either have forgotten or never knew this, that about the same time – circa. 1996 – that Mr. Mahama claims that supporters of Nana Akufo-Addo had rudely removed NDC campaign posters from the Kyebi Royal Palm Trees, another Kyebi citizen, a veritable rascal and then-deputy minister of the Rawlings Corporation (or R. C. Unlimited), by the name of Owuraku Amofa, was eerily and savagely parading the principal streets of Kyebi with AK-47-armed commandoes scaring the proverbial daylights out of the New Patriotic Party supporters of Nana Akufo-Addo.

In sum, it constitutes the very height of arrogance for Mr. Mahama, whose Bole-Bamboi constituents are not known to be tolerant of NPP supporters and sympathizers, to be presuming to lecture Nana Akufo-Addo on what a salutary democratic culture entails. Mr. Mahama may also need to undertake a fact-finding tour of Dzelukope, the ideological cradle of the so-called National Democratic Congress, and promptly report back to the Ghanaian people regarding the exact number of pro-NPP and Akufo-Addo posters that he finds in the town.

Perhaps Mr. Mahama also needs to be informed, in no uncertain terms, that the people of Kyebi, and Akyem-Abuakwa, in general, have taken more political abuse than any other sub-nationality of Ghanaians since the era of Ghana’s First Republic, and we want the hypocritical and cynical likes of Messrs. Mahama, Atta-Mills and Rawlings to get it loud and clear, and smack dab through the gray matter under their skulls, that the bloody era of the anthropophagic (or human-eating) “Culture-of-Silence” is well behind us.

Indeed, in 1996, the NDC had paid assassins and thugs, as well as night riders, scouring the Volta Region and, upon direct instructions from the Ridge Castle, summarily executing alleged and known supporters and sympathizers of the then-opposition New Patriotic Party. And having ensured that sizeable numbers of NPP supporters and sympathizers had either been literally liquidated or effectively run underground, Monsieur Rawlings and minions like Mr. Mahama and Prof. Atta-Mills would scurrilously and jauntily declare the Volta Region to be the World Bank of the NDC (WB-P/NDC).

Likewise, so presumptuously blasphemous has the Bole-Bamboi NDC-MP become, in the wake of his selection as Prof. Atta-Mills’ running-mate, that Mr. Mahama is even reported by a Ghana News Agency (GNA) correspondent to be claiming that “God, in his wisdom[,] created human beings in [such] a way that not all people accept the same thing and therefore all leaders who claim to be democratic need to teach their immediate supporters to respect that principle.”

Wow! Needless to say, in the days and weeks leading up to Election 2008, Messrs. Mahama and Atta-Mills would certainly do themselves and the Ghanaian electorate a lot of good by explaining exactly why it took a protracted 11 years for the P/NDC to return the country to democratic governance, and then to themselves, essentially, for another miserable 8 years of pseudo-democracy. Was it, for instance, because the “democratic principle” that Mr. Mahama so confidently vaunts about did not exist anywhere in the world between December 31, 1981 and January 1992? Or it was simply that “God in his [infinite] wisdom” had not yet deemed Ghanaians to be either intellectually and emotionally mature or civilized enough to practice the now abruptly auspicious principle of democracy?

*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) and “Reena: Letters to an Indian-American Gal” (Atumpan Publications/lulu.com, 2008). E-mail: [email protected].