No Smart Ghanaian Youths Are Followers of Mr. Rawlings

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

On the 32nd anniversary of his June 4 Uprising, former President Jerry John Rawlings told Ghanaians what they have always known since the hitherto unknown Ghana Air Force flight-lieutenant blood-bathed his way into the seat of stratocratic power and massive repression and intimidation of the Ghanaian people. Which is the fact that as a mediocre flight-lieutenant widely known to have consistently failed his promotion exams, Mr. Rawlings, at best, possesses the critical faculties and imagination of a teenager who was just bequeathed his father’s hulking mummy wagon and light-heartedly admonished to go for a jolly ride with his friends and associates.
Anyway, what was most heartening about his June 4 tirade of a speech was the ever self-righteous Mr. Rawlings’ final admission that he has, indeed, been a massive failure of unprecedented proportions all his life (See “I Didn’t Identify Smart, Young People To Take Over – Rawlings” Ghanaweb.com 6/5/11). Such failure, obviously, entailed a wan and an oblique allusion to his peremptory enstoolment and imposition of the now-President John Evans Atta-Mills on the members and supporters of the so-called National Democratic Congress.
The good news here, however, is that contrary to what Sogakope Jeremiah would have his countrymen and women believe, in both the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, Ghanaians massively rejected Mr. Rawlings’ stool-pigeon (at least that was how then-Candidate Mills was widely perceived), thus resoundingly proving to both themselves and the world at large that they were far more foresighted and intelligent than the former Ghanaian strongman made them out to be. In other words, it has taken Mr. Rawlings a whole decade to come to the grim realization that the man whom he adamantly chose canvassed to succeed him was scarcely the kind of presidential material needed to prosecute Ghana’s development agenda.
And so in reality, when Chairman Rawlings laments that he fought hard to oust the Kufuor-led New Patriotic Party (NPP) from power, only to have the wrong people back in power, the allusion is far less to the Mills-Mahama NDC government than the glaring fact that, indeed, none of the key operatives of the National Democratic Congress, including Mr. Rawlings, of course, are even half-capable of crafting a viable agenda, let alone successfully implementing the same for the palpable development of the country.
In other words, if, indeed, the “wrong people are back in power,” despite his vigorous efforts to sideline the main opposition New Patriotic Party from the august reins of governance, then, needless to say, the National Democratic Congress would have been better off had the party leadership decided not to contest Election 2008 at all.
Likewise, as to whether any really “intelligent, brilliant and smart” Ghanaians would have docilely allowed themselves to be culled out by an intellectually retrograde and behaviorally rambunctious personality like Mr. Rawlings is definitely moot. I am personally convinced that no “intelligent, smart, brilliant” and self-respecting young Ghanaians have ever subscribed to the vacuous and pseudo-socialist acquisitiveness of the National Democratic Congress and its self-righteous Robber Baron.
By the same token, it is my unabashed contention that only opportunistic and freeloading intellectuals and their shyster lawyer cronies have found it expedient all these three decades to truck with Sogakope Jeremiah, even as the coffers of our nation got cleaned like silverware. And so, for instance, when a jaded party hack like Mr. Ekwow Spio-Garbrah dashes down from London to join with the cold-calculating conspirators spoiling for the blood of Messrs. Atta-Mills and Mahama, primarily because Tarkwa-Atta had callously reneged on his alleged promise to name Konongo-Fante Ghana’s foreign minister, it becomes eerily clear precisely what Mr. Rawlings means by inexorably scheming to take his party back.

*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 author of “The Obama Serenades” (Lulu.com, 2011). E-mail: [email protected].
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