Dear Erika: I Still Stand By My Agyeman-Rawlings Critique

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

Following the publication of my article captioned "Konadu-Rawlings Plays Out of Her League," a reader-commentator by the name of Ms. Erika Amoako-Agyei wrote to carp me for failing to do what good and great scholars do: read the full-speech of Ghana's former first lady, presented before a graduating class of the Arizona-based Thunderbird School of Global Management, before penning and publishing my critique. I take this rare, albeit rather salutary, opportunity to express my unreserved and hearty gratitude to Ms. Amoako-Agyei.

Unfortunately, I have to strongly disagree with my critic that Mrs. Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings' speech contained anything either creative or refreshing. For starters, the longest-reigning Ghanaian first lady cynically attempted to defend her husband's ten-year veritable reign-of-terror by rather shamefully and pathetically and deviously claiming that the bloody Rawlings dictatorship was far more constructive and responsive to the needs and aspirations of the people than the present democratic political dispensation, which the former first lady obliquely and mischievously defined as a flagrantly elitist governance system that primarily catered to the well-being of the self-centered few.

Needless to say, any Ghanaian citizen old enough to have witnessed the 1982 sanguinary usurpation of democratic rule by the Rawlings-led Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), would be hard put to draw up a balance sheet on which the unarguably predatory regime of the PNDC emerged on a more beneficent side than such predecessor governments as that which were headed by the brutally slain Gen. Ignatius Kutu Acheampong, and even the extremely shortlived tenures of Drs. K. A. Busia and Hilla (Babini) Limann.

I also don't know why Mrs. Agyeman-Rawlings would so self-righteously describe Ghana's Fourth-Republican Constitution as "weak" and incoherent," when it was the functionally scurrilous and morally strangulating insertion of Indemnity Clauses protective of her own husband, herself and Mr. Rawlings' rag-tag band of certified PNDC assassins that has effectively hobbled our otherwise politically progressive instrument of civilized national stewardship. And, also, exactly what does Mrs. Rawlings mean when she lobs about such jaded phrases as "capacity building"? Precisely what "capacity" is she alluding to, and to what purpose, effect and whose benefit?

It is also rather paradoxical, to speak much less of the inescapably absurd, for the woman who suavely and silently shipped her own children abroad for the most expensive and elitist of Western cultural orientation, and schooling, while her husband spitefully and callously shuttered the country's leading institutions of higher learning, to be hypocritically decrying the abject academic privation of the bulk of Ghanaian children. And also, what is all this nonsense from Mrs. Rawlings about a supposedly "changing NEW global narrative" on Africa by Western scholars in which the spotlight has suddenly shifted from "the negative view of war, disease, poverty, starvation and corruption" to the epic success stories of a rising middle-class?

Has the hawkish former first lady ever heard of something called GYEEDA, SADA and Judgment Debts in Ghana? Or the arraignment of Kenya's President Uhuru Kenyatta before the International Criminal Court (ICC)? Or even the vehement and shameless attempt by some meanspirited African leaders, including Ghana's own President John Dramani Mahama, to use the institutional apparatus of the African Union (AU) to position killer African politicians and their agents above and beyond the tentacles of justice?

That the general quality of present-day Ghanaian education dramatically pales in comparison to the one that I experienced between the late 1960s and early 1980s, is decidedly beyond contest, unless by "capacity building," Mrs. Rawlings means her predatory acquisition of the Nsawam Cannery. And does the wife of the jolly liquidator of GIHOC know how Achimota School, the august elementary and intermediary academy that she and her husband so rapturously boast of having attended, came to be?

Now, don't start me any further, Sister Erika. You may call me just about any name in the book, but "Pull-Her-Down" is definitely not one of them. And if, indeed, the unvarnished truth so sorely hurts, you had better blame the bloody culprit, not the messenger.

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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
Nov. 27, 2013
E-mail: [email protected]
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