I Really Don't Get This One, Little Dramani

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Jan. 27, 2015
E-mail: [email protected]

Not that I do not fully appreciate the ambiguity of the entire enterprise of cyclical coups-de-tat, but the fact of the matter is that absolutely no African dictator deserves the solidarity or sympathy of anybody. But I guess in our part of the universe, where every behavioral act of humanity and morality has to be read backwards and upside down, solidarity and sympathy are what you get when your name is President Yahya Jammeh and the chairman of your regional club of former tyrants and dictators, and now faux-democratic chameleons, is called John Dramani Mahama from Ghana (See "ECOWAS Is With You - Mahama Tells Jammeh" Graphic Online 1/27/15).

While, indeed, I don't believe for a split-second that the rag-tag band of renegade soldiers who attempted to overthrow the Gambian dictator on December 30 last year would have been poised to immediately returning the country to a civilized culture of democratic governance, the urgent fact remains that the holding to ransom of the strip-mall country by 49-year-old Mr. Jammeh for nearly 21 years is not acceptable. And any regional political grouping that blandly endorses such act of tyranny must be composed of unconscionable leaders with mashed-potato brains. Don't ask me what the latter imagery means, or I may be forced to pile up more epithets.

Anyway, we have just learned via news reports that arriving in the Gambian capital of Banjul, Ghana's President John Dramani Mahama observed that: "In the African tradition, if anything happens in your brother's house, you have to go and visit [him] and make sure that things are okay. That is why I came." Actually, this asinine statement was reportedly released by the Chief-of-Staff, presumably, of the Ghanaian leader's official residence, the Flagstaff House, just before the globetrotting Mr. Mahama hopped onto his taxpayer-underwritten presidential jet for this most pointless flight.

The fact of the matter is that President Jammeh is a professional arsonist who has had his country deliberately set alight for most of the two protracted decades that he has forcibly occupied the seat of power. What the coup-plotters had rather shabbily attempted to do was put out the fire and bring some long-deserved coolness to the roasting heels of the peanut-chomping people of Banjul and its riverine environs. I don't know how long such direly needed coolness would have lasted, had the coup-plotters succeeded, but it surely would have presented the ECOWAS and the AU leaders the timely opportunity to begin discussing a quick transition to democratic governance.

I am not, however, the least bit surprised that President Mahama would so scandalously cozy up to his "Fellow African Brother," except that I am having a hard time locating the kind of "African Tradition" that Mr. Mahama had his Chief-of-Staff release for media and public consumption. Is it the Bole-Bamboi Tradition or the Yenntie Obiara Tradition of Kumasi-Manhyia? I am quite certain that the Dwaben and Asiakwa traditions are vastly different. Which is why I am also having such a hard time coming to terms with this admittedly mellifluous symphonic poppycock of something called "Our ECOWAS Protocols," which purportedly disdains the violent overthrow of governments.

Maybe Little Dramani needs to resurrect "Northern Homeboy" Dr. Hilla (Babini) Limann and profusely apologize for the violent overthrow of the latter's legitimately elected government of the People's National Party (PNP), by shit-bombing Chairman Jeremiah John Rawlings' Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) junta. Some national defense council, indeed!

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