Ghana And Somalia Have Different Cultural And Political Standards

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

Garden City, New York

August 14, 2014

E-mail: [email protected]

When Mr. Ginger-Man (that is not his real name, by the way) called to inform yours truly that he was spearheading a protest demonstration against Ghana's President John Dramani Mahama in Uncle Sam's sacred seat of governance, or the District of Columbia, and asked whether I would be interested in covering the same or at least compose a write-up of some sort, I involuntarily chuckled and then voluntarily snorted and made it pointedly clear to him that in my journalistic scheme of things, the bumbling Ghanaian leader did not rank much higher than a casual domestic news report, such as one about the anniversary celebration of a minor village chieftain. I also added that whatever clout and stature Mr. Mahama may be envisaged to posses mauger, as far as yours truly was concerned, the latter had much more to do with the long cumulative history of "Danquahland" than any remarkable individual achievements logged by the former Atta-Mills arch-lieutenant.

I also significantly added that I did not believe that holding a protest demonstration at the venue of the US-Africa Summit was really the most appropriate and opportune thing to do, as indisputably democratic and even salutary as this may be. Unless, of course, one were protesting the shameful onslaught of the cholera epidemic in Ghana's capital of Accra. Nonetheless, the rather inexcusably scandalous decision by the National Democratic Congress-sponsored editors of the Daily Post to use the rabidly jaundiced tirade of a Somali woman journalist to lambaste the admittedly modest group of anti-Mahama Ghanaian protesters in Washington, DC, was plain silly and completely out of place for the following reasons.

First of all, the afore-referenced Somali journalist, Ms. Yasmeen Maxamuud (I hope I have her name down correctly), clearly appeared to have a problem with the fact that for a people who came from one of the relatively most politically stable and economically prosperous countries on the African continent, the Ghanaian protesters were, somehow, protesting too much or gratuitously. And this was what the Daily Post editors cynically presumed to make a moral capital out of, knowing fully well that the Mahama-led government of the self-righteous, revolutionary and pontifical National Democratic Congress was unarguably the worst administration of its kind in postcolonial Ghanaian history. 

I mean, for a political party and government whose founders wantonly and ruthlessly executed their predecessors in the "revolutionary" name of "probity, transparency, accountability and justice," for merely taking out $50,000 housing loans, a piece, from our local banks, to expect that Ghanaians would sit duck and mum while President Mahama and his unconscionable cronies and hangers-on fleeced the nation raw, constitutes the very height of arrogance and abject depravity.

But perhaps the message that needs to be sent to impenitent NDC apparatchiks like the Daily Post editors, in unmistakable terms, is that Ghanaians like the Washington, DC, protesters do not set our development and political and cultural expectations clocks and/or agendas according to the tempo of Somali journalists like Ms. Maxamuud. We may, indeed, all be aptly classified as Third-World nationals and Africans, but we have our own unique and peculiar set of standards, priorities and expectations to worry about what one Somali woman journalist capriciously perceives to be our temperamentally insufferable persnickety.

And while, indeed, we may genuinely and sincerely sympathize with the unduly protracted political plight of the Somalis, nevertheless, we cannot in any way, whatsoever, be held responsible for the apocalyptic tragedy which the Somalis themselves and their leaders have collectively fashioned as a package of their own destiny. But, of course, we also fully appreciate the fact that the editors of the Daily Post would stoop so low as to expect Ghanaians to indulge themselves in the sort of morally and materially regressive politics of relativism that has enabled the cutthroat operatives of the Rawlings-minted National Democratic Congress to literally get away with Mega-Grand larceny and Felony Class-A Murder.

We must also quickly note the fact that NDC hirelings like the Daily Post editors may really feel genuine affinity for safely relocated Somali journalists like Ms. Maxamuud. After all, wasn't Chairman Rawlings, the founding-patriarch of their bloody party machine, named the African Union (AU) Ambassador to Somalia? Talk of birds of same feathers!