NDC Is Ghana's Al-Shabaab, Period!

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

The tragically accidental death of Prof. Kofi Awoonor in the crosshairs of the Somali-based Al-Shabaab Islamist terror group, has not, in any way, brought "the terror of Al-Shabaab into Ghanaian homes," as Mrs. Betty Mould-Iddrisu, the controversial former Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, would have her Ghanaian Facebook audience believe (See "Al-Shabaab's Terror Now in Ghanaian Homes - Betty Mould" Vibeghana.com 9/22/13). Al-Shabaab was always here, in Ghana, with us by a different name!

During the 1970s, as I clearly recall, the notable Ghanaian educator, poet and politician was widely reported to have stood on an anti-Acheampong rally podium and smugly declared: "I am first and foremost an Ewe before a Ghanaian." In other words, for him, Ghana was at best too large and culturally inorganic to be embraced in the name of nationhood. Prof. Awoonor (1935-2013) never apologized for that inexcusably divisive and ethnically chauvinistic remark.

Fortunately, however, at the time that he made the remark attributed to him, the former chairman of the Council-of-State was also widely reported to have been thunderously booed and forced off the platform. He would go on to play a vocal, active and prominent role in the three Ewe-dominated governments of the Chairman Jerry John Rawlings-led Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC), the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) and the so-called National Democratic Congress (NDC). And those three regimes were brutally primitive and violent juntas and faux-civilian regimes that forged a bloody track-record of ethnic cleansing - largely against the country's Akan ethnic majority.

Incidentally, this Akan-ethnic baiter, and hater, was known to have been married to an Asante woman for some three decades. Some of his most ardent critics claim that it was merely a common-law domestic arrangement of convenience; and that having thoroughly exhausted himself of "The Kwarteng Woman," with the most despicable forms of emotional and, some claim, physical abuse, Prof. Awoonor would literally discard his longtime companion like a used car.

The very fact that most of the major players of the National Democratic Congress have had to be legally protected by "Indemnity Clauses" inserted into Ghana's 1992 Republican Constitution, is an eerily striking evidence that, indeed, both in principle and practice, the Somali-originated Al-Shabaab terror machine is fundamentally no different from its far better organized and bizarrely legitimized counterpart of the Mahama-led National Democratic Congress.

And so, really, it is rather ironic for key NDC operatives like Mr. Samuel Okudzeto-Ablakwa, the Deputy Minister of Education, to so self-righteously and imperiously describe the Al-Shabaab terror attack, that also claimed the lives of 58 other victims from several countries, both on the African continent and abroad, in addition to Prof. Awoonor, in the upscale Westgate Shopping Mall, in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi, as "senseless."

Needless to say, the massive hail of gunfire that swept Prof. Awoonor in its bloody flux, was no more "heinous" than the 1979 summary execution of the former 8 Ghanaian military rulers and officers by the Rawlings-led Armed Forces Revolutionary Council, namely, Gens. Afrifa, Akuffo and Acheampong; and Utuka, Boakye, Felli, Amedume, Kyeremeh and, earlier on, Odartey-Wellington.

By now the full import of the traumatic impact of their murderous self-righteous conniption at their unsuspecting and innocent Ghanaian victims, ought to be hitting home hard on the leaders of the Al-Shabaab Wing of the National Democratic Congress. "All-Die-Be-Die," indeed!

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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
Sept. 22, 2013
E-mail: [email protected]
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