Mahama Is No Nkrumah: Stop Disturbing Us!

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

My prediction here is that whether he and his power-hungry supporters like it or not, President John Dramani Mahama is destined to stand down by the end of the Election 2012 petition hearings by the Atuguba-presided Supreme Court of Ghana. But, of course, this is also pretty much dependent on whether the key operatives of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) are as determined to let democratic justice prevail in the land, just as well as their counterparts of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) seem determined to illegitimately hang on to power.

One thing is inescapably clear - the Akufo-Addo Revolution is set to prevail well before the end of 2013; and anybody or group of bullies dead-set against letting just reign in the land, as it were, may well find themselves arraigned before the International Criminal Court (ICC). We see the expression of such desperation in the vigorous campaign by the NDC to foist Mr. John Dramani Mahama on a deviously and brutally usurped Ghanaian electorate.

Unfortunately for the rascals involved, this is not the largely tentative political landscape of the Ghana of 1992 or even 1996, for that matter; and neither is it the internecinely rancorous New Patriotic Party of the Ghana of 2008. This is the Ghana of 2013, where the rule of justice and law and order is a matter of course. The key operatives of the NDC may be slowly, albeit reluctantly, waking up to this democratic political culture of Fourth-Republican Ghana.

The good news is that they had better buck up and move with the proverbial flux of history or get mercilessly steamrolled by the salutary and salubrious juggernaut that is the Akufo-Addo Revolution. The publication of a brief article, sourced to the Boston Globe (I believe), by the Daily Post, sensationally captioned "Mahama's Books[sic] Assigned Reading At Yale" is not going to cut it either (See Ghanaweb.com 6/7/13). The Daily Post, as I have already had occasion to point out now and again, is one of the flagship media outlets of the Trokosi-Wing of the ruling National Democratic Congress. The main perennial objective of the Daily Post is to ensure Anlo-Ewe domination of our national political culture, and failing in the latter objective, at least to guarantee that non-Ewe figureheads assume our country's reins of governance for as long as such internal slavo-colonial political arrangement can be made possible.

Well, the patently non-news news of President Mahama's autobiography, My First Coup D'etat, being assigned reading by a liberally minded African Studies professor at Yale University is absolutely nothing like the epic decision by the Humanities curriculum designers of the City University of New York (CUNY), a sprawling and formidable public academy of some 22 college campuses in the late 1980s, to have the immortalized Professor Chinua Achebe's roman-a-clef novel Things Fall Apart selected as a permanent and an integral text of the University's two-part World Humanities course.

In other words, today Professor Achebe's Things Fall Apart ranks with such established or canonical literary works as Homer's Odyssey, Kalidasa's The Tales of Shakuntala, Conrad's Heart of Darkness and D. T. Niane's Sundiata: The Epic of Mali. Mahama's My First Coup D'etat, while esthetically middling and/or passable, is highly unlikely to become required reading of all freshman students at Yale University, even if the Black Studies course on whose textual list it appears is cross-listed with a more expansive and inclusive Introduction to World Politics course.

If, indeed, the Trokosi editors and publishers of the Daily Post wanted to give Ghanaians a genuinely great cause for celebration, they could have followed the indisputably laudable and pioneering trajectory of Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah, the latter's rather presumptuous and pontifical title notwithstanding. Then also, there have been such equally formidable and esthetically poignant continental African political autobiographies and biographies as Mandela's No Easy Walk to Freedom, Kaunda's Zambia Shall Be Free and Winnie Mandela's Part of My Soul Went with Him, among a plethora of others.

No big deal, Mr. Mahama, were the dear reader to ask me. Just one undeservingly lucky guy, that's all!

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

Department of English Nassau Community College of SUNY Garden City, New York June 7, 2013 E-mail: [email protected] ###