Nana Konadu’s ignoble past catches up with her

Our sages have said that if you talk too much, you end up greeting a goat.

Well, greeting a goat “Good morning!” may not be the worst mistake in one’s life. In fact, it may not be a mistake at all. Actually, I believe what these elderly men and women thinkers and philosophers meant is that “Whoever talks too much and too often, ends up leaving their thinking cap [or common sense] behind.”

When I first read the news story in which the long-shot founding-owner and presidential candidate of the National Democratic Party (NDP) claimed to have footed tuition-fee bills for the tertiary education of the late BBC-World News anchor Mr. Komla Dumor, I couldn’t help sighing with contemptuous disbelief.

Even more importantly, I felt that such outrageous claim could not be more offensive and scandalous to the parental integrity and responsibility of the Dumor family, in particular the remarkably successful professorial father of the deceased newscaster.

I also knew that it was only a matter of time before somebody far more eloquent and smarter than the claimer from the Dumor family pointedly rejoined this vilest and most vicious of self-aggrandizing mendacities.

For starters, those of us old enough-who have studiously followed the political shenanigans of the Rawlingses remember vividly Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings’s very public claim that the Rawlings clan was not nearly-half as wealthy as it had been widely made to seem by the media; and that it was largely by the generosity of friends of the family that the bloody couple had been able to ship all their four children abroad for tertiary schooling at some of the most expensive academies in the West, even as Chairman Jerry John Rawlings raucously accused the West of vampiric corporate sponging on the natural resources of continental Africa.

The glaring fact of their logic’s being violently out of whack with the reality seemed to have been completely lost on the bloody pair. In other words, one would have thought that the Gadhafy Green Book pseudo-scholars would have rather shipped their children to some of the Eastern-bloc countries for schooling.

But, of course, the preceding matter-of-fact observation is not the focal thrust of this column. What bears highlighting here is that if, indeed, the Rawlingses were so indigent as to rely on the generosity of wealthy friends to school their four children in some of the most expensive colleges and universities abroad, then how had Mrs. Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings come by the wherewithal to personally and fully foot tuition-fee bills for Mr. Dumor at Ghana’s flagship academy, the University of Ghana, for some three or four years? Was this some weird act of robbing Peter to pay Paul, as that tired adage goes?

Well, there is a simple answer here that I am quite certain Nana Konadu may not be too pleased to learn. And it is the very mundane and patently pedestrian fact that having completely run out of fetching material for her endless yarns of mendacities, the old hag has now resorted to liberally, and literally, taking credit for the remarkable achievements of any Ghanaians who came of age during the two protracted decades that the Rawlingses and the Tsikatas effectively hogged our national political culture and landscape.

Not that the Dumor family had done anything wrong; but it is still worth pointing out that either by pure accident or design, they had been brought into the orbit of the Anlo-Ewe Trokosi Revolutionary Nationalist butchers very likely because of their consanguineous affiliation with the equally bloody Tsikatas.

But, of course, we also need to promptly underscore the fact that long before the blood of the martyred three Akan high judges began to flow down the streets of Kutunse into Keta, Sogakope, Anloga and Aflao, there were the highly respected Annie Jiagges, the Baetas, Gbehos and the Apaloos from the same proverbial neck of the woods.

This is absolutely no strange juxtaposition to make; after all, haven’t our ancient Akan sages perspicuously observed that the bile is always found in the passionate embrace of the liver, no matter how rancorous the relationship between this pair might be?