How Dare You, Konadu Rawlings!

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
July 4, 2015
E-mail: [email protected]

Of all Ghanaians, the least qualified to impugn the citizenship and/or nationality of the newly appointed Chairperson of Ghana's Electoral Commission is former first lady Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings. This is a woman who has been married to the first, ever, non-Ghanaian postcolonial dictator-cum-"elected," two-term, president of Ghana. I am, of course, referring to Chairman Jerry John Rawlings, whose allegedly Scottish father was a British colonial expatriate who never took up Ghanaian citizenship, to the best of any knowledgeable Ghanaian's knowledge.

Then also, we have the cultural conundrum of the Ewe-mothered Mr. Rawlings - the Anlo-Ewe from whence Ms. Agbotui hails, are a patrilineal and patriarchal culture and people. What this means is that to be authentically reckoned as a bona fide Ewe citizen, one's father ought to have been born an Ewe. And so strictly speaking, Chairman Rawlings is a bona fide Scottish by both descent and citizenship. Now, here comes his wife, Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings, presuming to instruct Ghanaians to reject Mrs. Charlotte Kesson-Smith Osei, because the newly appointed Electoral Commissioner was born in Nigeria (See "Nana Konadu Questions EC Boss' Nationality" Today Newspaper 7/3/15).

Let Mrs. Konadu-Rawlings, who is herself widely known to be of Krobo and Ada heritage, produce the birth certificate of Mrs. Charlotte Osei and make her case before any legitimately constituted court of law in the land, instead of lamely and vacuously presuming to instruct the detractors of Mrs. Osei to go on a wild-goose chase for the same. Whether Mrs. Osei was born in Nigeria or not is not the most significant issue at stake here. What matters here is whether Mrs. Osei was born to Ghanaian or Nigerian parents in Nigeria, an ECOWAS country, assuming, even hypothetically, that, indeed, our new Electoral Commissioner was born in Nigeria. This is rather absurd, because Ghana's Fourth-Republican Constitution had to be drastically tweaked to qualify Chairman Rawlings to stand for and be elected President of Ghana.

Indeed, had he been old enough and been imbued with the desire, the former Ghana Airforce flight-lieutenant would not have qualified to stand for Prime Minister or President under Ghana's 1957, 1969 and 1979 constitutions. And yet, here we are with the woman who has piggybacked on the illegitimate son of a British colonial Cassanova telling Ghanaians precisely who qualifies for citizenship and who does not. If I were Mrs. Osei, Nana Konadu would be meeting me in court to prove her case or be slapped with a hefty fine and be bonded to be of good behavior. The fact of the matter is that this megalomaniacal woman has absolutely no credibility. In the lead-up to Election 2012, Mrs. Rawlings concocted a story seeking to discredit the three-time presidential candidate of Ghana's main oppostion New Patriotic Party, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo. In that previous instance, Mrs. Rawlings claimed that her husband's sometime ideological nemesis never attended nor graduated from any law school anywhere in the world.

Indeed, she ought to thank her stars that the man whose reputation she so viciously sought to destroy was too polished and noble to descend to her storm-drain level. It well appears that the woman who played Ghana's first lady for some two decades, and has since been engaged in a futile battle for the presidency, is so eaten with envy of Mrs. Osei, whose academic and professional credentials make Nana Konadu seem like a functional illiterate, as to want her banished from public view. And so instead of commending her intellectual and professional superior for her sterling achievements, the woman who colluded with her husband to cold-bloodedly assassinate Justice Cecilia Koranteng-Addow, and three others, would now impudently presume to add Mrs. Osei to her bloody hit list. Fat chance, I say!

Having wistfully realized this tilting at windmills to be just that - an exercise in futility, Mrs. Rawlings has now turned her attention to the editors and publishers of the government-owned Daily Graphic, the one-time propaganda rag of her husband's. Her rotten and rancid beef here is that on July 1, instead of publishing photographs of Ghana's globally infamous dictator, ex-President Kwame Nkrumah, the editor of the Daily Graphic preferred to showcase Mrs. Osei! Maybe somebody ought to sit Nana Konadu down and lecture her on what the so-called Republic Day represents for those of us lovers and fighters for constitutional democracy.

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