Playing the tribal card will not help Attivor or NDC retain power

I suppose Chairman Jerry John Rawlings honestly, albeit perhaps contritely and ruefully, had the brutal abduction and murder of the three Akan-descended Accra High Court judges in the frontal lobe of his cranial gray matter, when he solemnly and angrily counseled the desperate and cynical likes of Mrs. Dzifa Attivor against any vacuously self-righteous tendency to play the tribal card against the leadership of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), especially against Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, the 2016 presidential candidate of the country’s largest opposition party (See “Rawlings Flays Attivor Over ‘Distasteful’ Comments” TV3Network.com / Ghanaweb.com 4/27/16). This may well explain Ghana’s longest ruling military dictator and former democratically elected president’s quite timely advice to both Mrs. Attivor and her Amen-Corner denizens that “Before making such unfortunate statements, let’s remove the logs in our own eyes.”

It is quite obvious that Mr. Rawlings’ use of the possessive plural pronoun of “ours” and the subjective pronoun use of “us,” as in “let’s remove the logs in our own eyes,” was in reference to the shamelessly hypocritical leaders of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC), particularly reprobate and unconscionable party-machine operatives like Mr. Johnson Asiedu-Nketia, the career NDC General-Secretary, who have come public to fully support the ethnically divisive assertion of Mrs. Attivor, the former Transport Minister who was dismissed from the Mahama cabinet a couple of months ago, for her key role in the grand heist of the Ghanaian taxpayer’s money in the criminal branding of some state-owned city buses with the pictures of Messrs. John Evans Atta-Mills, late, and John Dramani Mahama.

The so-called branding or re-branding of the aforesaid state-owned city buses with the pictures of present and past leaders of the ruling National Democratic Congress, for the most part, was unmistakably aimed at affording unfair advantage to the presidential incumbent in this watershed general-election year. According to Mrs. Attivor, it is incumbent on every eligible Ewe voter – she had actually used the term “Voltarians,” the more appropriate terminology is “Voltaics” or “Voltaians,” to blindly and vengefully cast his/her ballot in favor of the Mahama-led government of the National Democratic Congress, because in the likely event of Nana Akufo-Addo’s being elected President come November 2016, the New Patriotic Party (NPP) leader is certain to exclusively target the Ewe-descended members of the Mahama cabinet for criminal prosecution and incarceration.

To back up her ethno-baiting and fear-mongering assertion, Ms. Attivor conducted a dry run of the names of Messrs. Victor Selormey, late, Tsatsu Tsikata and Daniel Abodakpi, all of whom were prosecuted, convicted and jailed by the John Agyekum-Kufuor-led government of the New Patriotic Party. Well, what is even more worth highlighting but which a deviously Machiavellian Mrs. Attivor had conveniently failed to add is, of course, the fact that among the former NDC cabinet appointees also prosecuted and imprisoned by the Kufuor government were Monsieur Kwame Peprah, the former Finance Minister under the pathologically, albeit self-righteously, corrupt regime of Chairman Rawlings, the man widely credited with being the founding-patriarch of the ruling party. And here, as well, ought to be promptly and poignantly highlighted the fact that Mr. Peprah is a bona fide Akan-descended Ghanaian citizen.

But, of course, predictably and characteristically, in the rabid perception and jaundiced imagination of Ewes like Mrs. Attivor, Akans like Mr. Peprah are bona fide members of a subhuman species. Then there is also the Nzema/Akan-descended Dr. Sipa Yankey who was immured by President Kufuor, as well as the northern-descended Mallam Issah, a self-confessed criminal convict and member of one of the Nkrumah-leaning minor political parties who has never forgiven Akufo-Addo for having been the Attorney-General and Minister of Justice under whose watch the coopted stalwart of the Limann-founded People’s National Convention (PNC) was convicted and imprisoned.

But what is tragically amusing here is that Ms. Attivor and her largely NDC-affiliated staunch backers do not explain to their audiences the fact of whether any of the men prosecuted and sent to the slammer by the Kufuor Administration had been found guilty because they had defrauded the Ghanaian taxpayer or merely because they belonged to the wrong ethnic group or sub-nationality. This is what any critically thinking Ghanaian citizen ought to be talking about. Ironically, and we shall fully expand on this trend or aspect of our argument in due course, she might not have realized this, but Mrs. Attivor actually cast the first crossover NDC ballot in favor of President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, when she unwisely decided to make a tribal issue out of a purely criminal and judicial matter.

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