Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings Should Not Be Trusted

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

In the wake of her largely pro-forma “vetting” by the Vetting Committee of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), former first lady Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings was reported to have assured the committee of her deep-seated intention of retaining her membership of the ruling party (See “Konadu Won’t Leave NDC – Vetting Committee Chairman” Ghanaweb.com 6/7/11).
This declaration comes right on the heels of former President Jerry John Rawlings’ adumbration in his June 4 tirade that in the likely event of his wife and partner-in-crime losing the presidential nomination of the NDC for Election 2012, the couple and their staunch supporters intended to form a new political party.
It appears as if anxiety over the possibility of the Rawlingses breaking away from the National Democratic Congress after the party’s July convention in Sunyani, the Brong-Ahafo regional capital, had constituted the bulk of the approximately 45 minutes that Mrs. Rawlings, reportedly, spent before Alhaji Issifu Ali and his vetting associates. Nevertheless, until the NDC Vetting Committee gets the definitive answer from Mr. Rawlings himself, it would be rather premature and unpardonably unwise for Chairman Ali to start popping up his celebratory champagne. We know this from the lead-up to Election 2008 when, in the wake of then-Candidate John Evans Atta-Mills’ selection of Mr. John Dramani Mahama as his running-mate, Mrs. Rawlings vehemently protested and insisted on her husband and Ghana’s longtime dictator having the last word.
On the other hand, it bears highlighting the otherwise quite obvious fact that, indeed, the Rawlingses stand to lose the most if the couple makes the rash decision of decamping from the terror-mongering political machine with whose authorship they have been singularly credited.
For starters, any avid student of the recent rancorous events that have transpired among the top-echelon membership of the National Democratic Congress, particularly between the Rawlingses’ camp and the Mills-Mahama camp, readily sensed the imperious proprietary rights that the Rawlingses seem to exert on the NDC. It is almost as if the party was their proverbial cash-cow, failure of whose hired guns, in the personalities of Messrs. Mills and Mahama, to render a generous account of their stewardship has resulted in the kind of infantile tantrums that Ghanaians have been witnessing in recent weeks.
The creation of a new party, even by a putatively “charismatic” Mr. Rawlings, is likely to go the way of Dr. Yao Obed Asamoah’s Democratic Freedom Party (DFP), which emerged out of the NDC in the wake of Mr. Rawlings’ infamous Swedru Declaration. Even more important to highlight is the stark fact of the Rawlingses having precipitously lost much of their hitherto formidable political clout and awe among the general membership of the party. The latter, of course, came about as a result of a rambunctious, vindictive and megalomaniacal Mr. Rawlings’ attempt to literally hi-jack and stage-manage the agenda of the Mills-Mahama government.
Needless to say, having handpicked the tax-law wonk and former associate professor of Ghana’s flagship academy, the University of Ghana, the Gaddhafy-molded and mentored Mr. Rawlings had deluded himself into believing that in a Mills presidency, the former stood the quite facile chance of establishing a “Lugardian” sort of “proxy presidency,” or indirect rule, in which Ghana’s longest-serving tyrant could continue to visit prejudice, misery and mayhem on his perceived enemies and political opponents.
The preceding appears to have garnered prime grist in the then-Candidate Mills’ rather diffident public avowal to consult his former boss around-the-clock, as it were, on the nitty-gritty of governance. In retrospect, it appears as if then-Candidate Mills had tactically and voraciously feasted on the oversized ego of his former boss in order to carve his own niche and then opportunely sideline the career coup-plotter and veritable political nuisance.
What Ghanaians are presently witnessing are the definitive death pangs of the Rawlingses, as they hopelessly, albeit violently, thrash against the inevitable and fortuitously recede into oblivion and total sociopolitical and cultural irrelevance, almost as if the bloody couple never existed in time and space.

*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 a Governing Board Member of the Accra-based Danquah Institute (DI) and the author of “The Obama Serenades” (Lulu.com, 2011). E-mail: [email protected].