Rawlings will not be upstaged

Reports that former President Jerry John Rawlings has discredited and advised that assertions made by Maj (Ret) Derrick Oduro, the Deputy Defense Minister, that Mr. Rawlings and Dr. Obed Yao Asamoah, the former Chairman of the country’s main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), have written letters to President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo expressing displeasure with the secessionist activities of the so-called Homeland Study Group Foundation (HSGF) must be taken with a pinch of salt are patently pedestrian (See “Major Oduro Lied – Rawlings Dismisses Statement on Volta Separatists” Ghanaweb.com 11/28/19).

The very short denial memo and/or press release put out by the office of Mr. Rawlings, signed by the former dictator’s Communications Director, Mr. Kobina Andoh Amoakwa, must also be taken with a pinch of salt because, ultimately, the former Ghana Airforce’s Flight-Lieutenant is bound to hold a press conference saying precisely the same thing that he is now publicly accusing the Deputy Defense Minister of having mischievously concocted in his name. Mr. Rawlings has no other alternative but to conduct himself in the statesman’s manner that has been woefully lacking in him for as long as any of us Ghanaian citizens who is 50-plus years old can remember.

But, of course, Chairman Rawlings would be a damn brazen liar for echoing precisely what he is presently accusing Maj Oduro of lying about. What we mean here is that at heart, Mr. Rawlings is perfectly on the same page as 85-year-old Mr. Charles Kormi Kudzordzi (aka Papavi), the official leader of the HSGF. You see, Dear Reader, the very tenor of the two inescapably rabidly anti-Akan juntas led by the then-Flt-Lt Jerry John Rawlings, namely, the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) and the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), in all likelihood, shored up the steely determination of these latter-day secessionists in their inexorable quest to wrecking our beloved nation.

Throughout his 20-year stranglehold on Ghanaian politics and culture, Chairman Rawlings behaved like a neocolonialist Czar with deeply entrenched Ewe backing which found institutional expression in the Cuban-backed establishment of the infamous 64th Battalion of Infantry, “ewerly” commanded by Lt.-Col. Larry Dovlo-Lartey. It was in the meanspirited climate of Mr. Rawlings’ inveterately anti-Akan revolution in which the Homeland Study Group Foundation was born. In 2007, or thereabouts, for instance, when then-President John Agyekum-Kufuor intervened in the internecine hostilities in Anloga that revolved around a chieftaincy dispute, Mr. Rawlings virulently accused Mr. Kufuor of luridly attempting to impose Asante imperialism on the citizens and inhabitants of the southeastern tip of the Volta Region.

Then also, the current President of the National House of Chiefs (NHC), Togbe Afede, XIV, damned President Kufuor for making the former feel like a complete foreigner in his own country. So it is incontrovertibly clear that the Kudzordzi Revolt or subversive activities are not really a blip or minor and isolated disturbance on Ghana’s political landscape; it is inherently the main pulse of the entire leadership of the so-called Republic of Western Togoland. Mr. Rawlings cannot honestly claim to be totally unaware of the seditious activities of the Homeland Study Group Foundation. He is the very nerve center of this group.

We cannot, however, vouch one way or another for the stance of Ghana’s longest-reigning Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, except to briefly and casually observe that Dr. Obed Asamoah was a key player of the 20-year stranglehold of the Rawlings cabal on Ghanaian political culture. In contrast to the general unified stance of the Anlo-Ewe Trokosi Nationalist Revolutionaries, however, Dr. Asamoah staunchly supported the pro-independence movement that culminated in the morally enlightening decision by President Akufo-Addo to have the present-day Oti Region, which some of the Anlo-Ewe leaders claimed to be their personal and private landed property by reason of having joined the British military in the latter’s imperialist battle against the Germans for control and ownership, carved out of the Volta Region.

Some critics and observers have been wondering why it is taking so long for Mr. Rawlings to issue any public statement on the treasonous activities of the HSGF. Well, chances are that the infamous fork-tongued Sogakope Mafia Capo has been trying to figure out precisely how to suavely deck the mask of a conciliatory statesman while at the same time studiously ensuring that he did not dampen the centrifugal momentum of the Kudzordzi Gang of radical revolutionary thugs. For his imminent press conference or press statement, those of us who have been sedulously following the hawkish and subversive activities of the half-Scottish career coup-plotter are not holding our breaths. Not the least bit, were the Dear Reader to ask yours truly.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

E-mail: [email protected]