The Life And Times Of J. J. Rawlings ? Part 3

The recent report, published by The Ghanaian Chronicle, alleging through one former Engineering lecturer of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), that His Tyrannical Eminence, Flt.-Lt. Jeremiah John Rawlings, sought to stage-manage the 1992 Ghanaian Constitution in order to perpetuate his tyranny may be aptly characterized by those of us who have been studiously following the country?s political history over the last quarter-century as ?A No-News News?(Ghanaweb.com 7/29/05). And here, it may be recalled, for instance, that right about the same period that Ghana?s Fourth Republican Constitution was in the drafting process, a vagabond (or hobo) by the name of Nana Akuffo (or Mr. Akuffo), I forget exactly how the godforsaken tramp styled himself, who claimed to be the son of the NDC parliamentary representative for the Akuapem-North constituency, approached this writer about the possibility of the latter collaborating with Mr. Akuffo to produce a video documentary to be flamboyantly titled ?President Rawlings: A Colorful African Leader.? I was, according to Mr. Akuffo, who turned out to be a veritable scam-artist, to feature as a co-narrator of this dubious project, which was to be supervised by an unnamed white-American sociology professor of New York University. Naturally, I asked Mr. Akuffo just how he had learned of my existence and identity and promptly became suspicious when he could not reasonably acquit himself.

Nonetheless, I was not surprised that he would approach me; after all, wasn?t I one of the few fairly well-known continental African journalists in the New York metropolitan enclave? What surprised me quite a bit was the fact that Mr. Akuffo, who looked to be a half-decade or a little more older than I, appeared to have actually been ?stalking? me, for the guy approached me just as I was about to enter the security portals of the apartment complex ? Dara Gardens ? where I then resided. And so naturally, I was a little startled, particularly when the guy also started gushing about the purported achievements of the so-called National Democratic Congress (NDC). I also wondered whether ?Ali Baba? and his notorious terror-machine had dispatched Mr. Akuffo to stake me out and possibly unleash the selfsame deadly bite sicced on the three Ghanaian high court judges and the retired army officer nearly a decade before. And, to be certain, I felt quite convinced about this trend of thought, which must have come off to the NDC lackey as rather paranoid, because the National ?Decapitators? Congress was known to be brazenly engaged in commando-type terrorist regimen of the kind attributed to the erstwhile Soviet Union between the 1930s and 1960s. In any case, it appeared to me that Mr. Akuffo?s rather lame attempt at co-opting me into his filiopietistic videography (or video-documentary) on His Tyrannical Eminence was, perhaps, geared towards affording a modicum of undeserved scholastic credibility to his godforsaken project and the latter?s subject. I, therefore, promptly declined the offer ? which was supposed to reap me an unspecified handsome financial reward ? and bluntly riposted that while I might, indeed, not be the smartest Ghanaian scholar or intellectual around these United States of America, I definitely knew myself not to be the dumbest either. Needless to say, that was the last time that I saw and heard of ?Mr. Nana Akuffo.?

Indeed, I herein take the rather abrasive liberty of calling the preceding character a hobo, vagabond and a tramp because less than a half-hour into our conversation ? having made the near-deadly mistake of bringing him into my living-room ? Mr. Akuffo was already trying to con his way into taking up temporary residence with me. But, perhaps, even more disturbingly, the guy also bragged about conning two unsuspecting Ghanaian women, living, each, in two different boroughs, into feeding, lodging and sleeping with him, with either of these women firmly, albeit erroneously, believing that Mr. Akuffo was their ?main man? or ?main squeeze,? as it were. I promptly congratulated the gigolo and showed him out through the doorway.

In his ?revelation? to The Ghanaian Chronicle, Professor Y. A. Nuama Akyeampong claims that in his fatuous bid to enstooling himself as Ghana?s Life-President, His Tyrannical Eminence, through P/NDC Security Chief Capt.(Rt.) Kojo Tsikata, gave the former KNUST lecturer ?seven books to study and come out with something that was to be put in the Constitution [in order] to make Mr. Rawlings superior to all men who have had a [any?] semblance of presidential behavior in Ghana?(Ghanaweb.com 7/29/05). And here, it goes without saying that the long and clunky prepositional phrase of: ?to make Mr. Rawlings superior to all men who have had a [any?] semblance of presidential behavior in Ghana? does not quite make sense. Unless, of course, one also concurs with the rather bizarre and outright weird premise that His Tyrannical Eminence, indeed, ?has a semblance of presidential behavior? in mainstream Ghanaian political parlance. And here, again, we must balk at naming names, as it were, for how could we, under God?s heavens, live with ourselves were we to lunatically reduce the regal and genius likes of Drs. J. B. Danquah, Busia, Asafu-Adjei; Messrs. Koi-Larbi, Paa Willie, Gbedemah and Akuffo-Addo to the Stygian and scatological level of Mr. Jeremiah John Rawlings? Of course, we clearly recognize the fact that His Tyrannical Eminence stands in a class all by himself ? for, after all, hasn?t this lost soul distinguished himself as at once the most erratic, murderous and cognitively dissonant of all pretenders to the praetor?s chair at the Osu Castle? And, perhaps, in the purely instinctual sense of being the veritable product of British imperialism, His Tyrannical Eminence is the sole legitimate claimant of The Castle. And, needless to say, it is not for nothing that this writer, among a myriad of others, have fervidly called for the conversion of the Osu Castle into a national museum, a threnodic ? or mournful ? monument and an ineluctable reminder of five centuries of continental African humiliation. And in much the same way that the Israeli government would not wish to be ceded the infamous Auschwitz Nazi Concentration Camp to be used as the official residence of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, let it not be said that five-hundred years of brutal enslavement have only served to endear Ghanaians into acquiring a pathological craving for perpetual enslavement by our former European colonial overlords.

Interestingly, however, the Ghanaian Nebuchadnezzar has not been totally devoid ? or bereft ? of staunch and ardent collaborators. During the early 1990s (perhaps between 1993 and 1994), for instance, this writer met another Rawlings lackey by the name of Dr. Cletus Duwornu, who claimed to be studying for his second doctoral degree at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In a bid to apotheosizing His Tyrannical Eminence, Dr. Duwornu claimed to have actually phoned or personally traveled to the Universities of Pennsylvania and London to ascertain as to whether President Nkrumah had earned any doctoral degree(s) from either institution. The answer to his mischievous sleuthing, Dr. Duwornu claimed, had been a resounding ?No!? Indeed, in a deafeningly lurid and wistful tone of patronage ? perhaps geared towards mollifying this writer, then an ardent Nkruma(h)ist ? Dr. Duwornu lamented that if Ghana?s pioneering premier had conducted himself with a remarkable modicum of moral decency, President Nkrumah would, in all likelihood, have reigned for at least a generation. In sum, for Dr. Duwornu, Mr. Rawlings was the man to beat. President Nkrumah, in essence, was a president-manque. But like all cynical political hangers-on, Dr. Duwornu appeared to impudently thrive on the scandalously paradoxical and oxymoronic. For, needless to say, the P/NDC hack also envisaged something of Nkrumah?s charismatic persona in Mr. Rawlings; in other words, the latter was being billed as the ?New Nkrumah? come to fulfill that which the original Nkrumah, the pan-Africanist messiah, had woefully fallen short of actualizing. In essence, for Dr. Cletus Duwornu, Mr. Rawlings had ?Out-Nkrumah-ized President Kwame Nkrumah.?

The preceding notwithstanding, what singularly etched a memory of Dr. Cletus Duwornu, albeit a rather unpleasant memory, in the mind of this writer was when the former lunatically asserted, during the one and only telephone conversation we had, that the massive forest fires which engulfed much of southern Ghana in 1983 were actually flared by some anti-Ewe Asantes who wanted to embarrass and, in effect, destabilize the veritable killer machine that was the so-called Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), whose reign Dr. Duwornu claimed to have been the most auspicious in post-colonial Ghanaian history. In sum, what the preceding points to is the fact that the proverbial ?Madman of Larterbiokoshie? may, indeed, not be all by himself in his well-calibrated, clinical lunacy.

And on the question of qualifications for the Presidency, the 1992 Ghanaian Constitution may be aptly deemed to be the most cynical and myopic and dangerous, even while also impudently pretending to be the most progressive, inclusive and modernistic of all our four constitutions. Almost every mature Ghanaian of sound cognitive temperament knows that the Fourth Republican Constitution was drafted by a bunch of crafty, lily-livered ?experts? apt to obsequiously coddling a swashbuckling career coup-plotter and mass murderer in a pathetic bid to forestalling any future attempt by this political barracuda to summarily derailing Ghanaian democracy. Needless to say, under the three previous Ghanaian constitutions, His Tyrannical Eminence would not have qualified to merely put forth his candidacy, or presidential ambitions, much less to brazenly extort our mandate and proceed to execute our supreme court judges. The counter-productive upshot of such dastardly deed, on the part of the mis-framers of the 1992 Fourth Republican Constitution, was to have flagrantly imposed a primitive stratocrat on themselves and the rest of us for twenty infernal years.

In any case, what ought to be logically and legitimately asked is why it has taken Professor Nuama Akyeampong more than a dozen years to come out with his thesis ? or is it an ?open-secret?? ? regarding Mr. Rawlings? lingering and perennial intent to derailing Ghanaian democracy? And while it is quite refreshing for the former KNUST professor to exhort his countrymen and women not to underestimate Mr. Rawlings, Professor Nuama Akyeampong probably need not to have exhorted us in that direction, more so when the former P/NDC insider claims to have rather sheepishly allowed himself to have been co-opted into the criminal confidence of the Rawlings-Tsikata Reign of Terror. But even more significantly, Professor Nuama Akyeampong need not to be exhorting us not to underestimate the morbid extent of his former boss? lunacy, because those of us who truly care about the auspicious destiny of Ghana have always been prepared to lay down our lives to this effect. And it has only been the pathetic intellectual and spiritual blindness of the likes of Professor Nuama Akyeampong which has rendered our mission quite an uphill task. And while, indeed, we welcome Professor Nuama Akyeampong?s critical confession, nonetheless, it may be aptly deemed to have come rather too tardily and punily.

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., teaches English and Journalism at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. Listed in the forthcoming (2005) directory of ?Who?s Who Among America?s Teachers,? Okoampa-Ahoofe is the author of eleven volumes of poetry and prose, including Nananom: Foremothers, a volume of poetry which will be published by iUniverse.com this month.

Views expressed by the author(s) do not necessarily reflect those of GhanaHomePage.