Is Konadu Rawlings for real on NUGS?

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
April 3, 2016
E-mail: [email protected]

When her American assigns nearly two years ago brought me up on some trumped up charges of “ageism, sexism and sexual harassment,” my understanding was that my continuous criticism of the former First Lady (first lady, indeed!) in my journalistic writings stood the risk of damaging diplomatic relations between Ghana and the United States. This amused me silly, because there was this implicitly oversized presumption that the then-Acting President of the State University of New York-sponsored community college where I taught, and have been teaching for some twenty years now, was the political coequal of President Barack Obama, the man I had earlier on been accused by some administrative higher-ups at my college of invidiously and flagrantly campaigning for, instead of opening the assigned textbook for my class – one of them, that is – and instructing my students strictly according to the dictates of the curriculum.

Naturally, I felt sick to my stomach, as many a New Yorker is wont to say. I even came dangerously close to vomiting onto the desk of my seven-and-odd-footer accuser. For truth be told: I had never ever for the life of me envisaged Mrs. Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings as any more than the criminally collusive wife, or domestic partner, of Chairman Jerry John Rawlings, the pathologically impenitent Butcher-of-Sogakope. What I was presently witnessing to my utter horror and indescribable shame and embarrassment was that, somehow, the Black-American guests of the bloody couple had grossly mistaken my laid-back profile on campus to logically imply that, somehow, I belonged to one of the bottom-most socioeconomic and political rungs of Ghanaian society. To these post-civil rights “Negroes,” for that matter, I ought to have been smart enough to have known far better than to cavalierly presume to rather unwisely take undue advantage of my new-found American citizenship and identity by also presuming to have elevated my old supposedly marginal nobody-status in Ghanaian society.

There was, of course, absolutely no need, whatsoever, for me to alert these studiously misguided “New Negroes” to the fact that Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings and her half-Scottish kleptocratically revolutionary husband were illegal squatters on my ancestral lands at Nsawam-Adoagyiri. That would come up in another installment of this column in the near future, for the battle against these two bloody political and socioeconomic parasites has only begun.

Well, the woman whose husband and the latter’s godforsaken associates of thugs of the so-called Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) ran nearly every courageous and intelligent and independent-minded leader of the National Union of Ghanaian Students (NUGS), not Ghana Students, by the way, out of the country would now have Ghanaians believe that the NUGS’ executive operatives have capriciously morphed into the servile mouthpieces of some powerful politicians and influential public-service officials, to wit, the Mahama-led National Democratic Congress (NDC), which, by the way, was founded by Chairman Jerry John Rawlings.

The last time I checked, Mr. Rawlings was still the legitimately wedded husband of Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings. Perhaps, she may so soon have forgotten this, but I was in Kumasi, the Asante Region’s capital, when Chairman Rawlings and his Khaki-sporting and AK-47-toting Abongo Boys swarmed and swamped the sprawling campus of the erstwhile University of Science and Technology (UST), now Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), and promptly proceeded to brutally assault and mercilessly maul the peacefully gathered membership of a national convocation of the National Union of Ghanaian Students.

The NUGS membership had met to elect new leaders as well as strategize responsibly against vicious and barbaric attempts by the Rawlings Posse to force these cranial trustees of the country to toe the PNDC junta line. Several humans on both sides may well have lost their lives. Actually, what had happened was that the AK-47 Abongo Boys had brought in big-muscled “Atinga Boys” from the Obuasi mines, otherwise known as the Ashanti Gold Fields Corporation, who had then been brutally sicced on these students. The mine workers had been told by Chairman Rawlings and his henchmen and women that it was criminally unruly students like those at “Kumasi Legon” whose ungrateful and parasitic rowdiness was squarely to blame for the acute economic problems of the country. If something wasn’t done to put these good-for-nothing knaves into their place, the Abongo Boys insisted, the entire country may be headed for the dogs in the offing.

This, in essence, is the history of Chairman Rawlings and the NUGS. And it is this transparently verifiable historical record that ought to have been re-played by the NUGS’ executive leadership, as a rejoinder, for the sobering benefit and moral edification of Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings, and not an apologetic and wishy-washy enumeration of what the NUGS has been doing for its dues-paying membership lately. I also don’t know what the student leaders and administrators of the Ghana Telecommunications University were thinking, when they invited Konadu-Rawlings to deliver its 14th “Prestigious” Lecture Series. It turns out, after all, that Ghana, indeed, went to the dogs, as the AK-47-toting Abongo Boys had predicted.

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