Don’t Blame Nana Konadu for Rawlings-Mills Impasse

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

Maybe it has something primordial to do with the primal attempt of our Biblical patriarch, Mr. Adam Hebrew, to fault his wife, Mrs. Eve Hebrew, before Divine Providence (otherwise known as the Creator-God) in the epic matter of the devouring of The Forbidden Fruit, but those of us who have studiously observed the purely “horse-and-rider” relationship between former President Jeremiah John Rawlings and his former arch-lieutenant, the now-President John Evans Atta-Mills, can confidently and vehemently beg to differ with Mr. Samuel Nartey George, of the so-called Government Communication Team, that former First-Lady Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings has absolutely nothing substantive, whatsoever, to do with the gelid relationship between Togbui Avaklasu I and my good, old Uncle Tarkwa-Atta (See “Nana Konadu Behind Rift Between Rawlings And Mills” (PeacefmOnline.com 4/29/12).
To be certain, Nana Konadu’s vaulting political ambition was sparked in the late 1980s, with her swashbuckling husband’s clearly and publicly articulated desire that at the close of his projected 20-year “revolutionary” chokehold on the country, his wife’s tenure shall commence. It is rather a pity that in their giddy grab for power, it appears that none of Mr. Rawlings’ opportunistic political associates and hangers-on had paid any attention. This, logically, leads one to inescapably conclude that Togbui Avaklasu has always been dead-on accurate in his assessment that Ghanaians are largely amnesiac, cowardly and, were I not a bit nervous to admit it, clinically obtuse.
Maybe such obtuseness of our collective national imagination has much to do with the fact of modern chattel slavery having begun on the shores of our country and ended with the equally psychologically and morally debilitating regime of European colonial imperialism and the acute crisis of identity and the psychical self-alienation that come with it. What with this morbid fascination of postcolonial Ghanaians with people sporting European names, to the damnable extent of such lost souls among the executive ranks of the so-called National Democratic Congress (NDC) as Messrs. Ade “Coker” and Nii Lantey “Vanderpuije” cavalierly presuming to summarily disenfranchise Ghanaians with incontrovertibly indigenous names like Owusu, Ababio and Agyepong, for ready examples, by preventing Akan residents of the Odododiodio Constituency of Central Accra from participating in the recent biometric registration program and exercising their inalienable civic responsibility come December 2012.
Indeed, rather than Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings having anything to do with it, the deliberately induced frigid relationship between Messrs. Rawlings and Mills began with the former capriciously and viciously attempting to divert the attention of the latter from the main purpose and agenda for which his countrymen and women elected the former tax-law professor by the proverbial skin of his teeth, into assuming the politically unproductive role of a medieval Inquisitor hell-bent on rounding up and systematically and publicly humiliating his political opponents, rivals and the perceived inveterate enemies of Mr. Rawlings and his National Democratic Congress slaughter-machine.
The preceding observations are clearly articulated and validated by my most recent takes/articles on Messrs. Kpegah and Rawlings. In other words, the indisputable problem, or bottleneck, in the strained relationship between Messrs. Rawlings and Mills is the longtime Ghanaian dictator himself; and the only solution by way of constructively resolving the same, is for Togbui Avaklasu to totally hands-off the government of his former protégé, however lackluster the retired strongman may deem the same. After all, as former President John Agyekum-Kufuor had prime and frank occasion to remind his incurably self-righteous predecessor, the Rawlings-led government of the National Democratic Congress was never the best or even the second-best government in postcolonial Ghanaian history.

Put another way, the implicit opinion of Mr. Kufuor – and it bears emphasizing that the latter is not alone in his quite accurate and judicious assessment – is that the main problem with Mr. Rawlings is his morbid failure to emotionally wise up and mature beyond his 4-year-old’s egocentric temperament. His very adamant and persistent decision to foist a clearly managerially incompetent then-Vice President Atta “Juliet Cotton” Mills on his party and, by extension, the country at large, eloquently testifies to such crippling moral affliction.

*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 “Danquah v. Nkrumah: In the Words of Mahoney.” E-mail: [email protected].