The Road to Kigali – Part 27

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

I have yet to read and digest the contents of the State of the Nation Address presented to Ghana’s Fifth Parliament of the Fourth Republic. But it is almost certain to be drab and characteristically uninspiring; I don’t know whether this has anything to do with the fee-free education for Northern Ghanaians that the latter have been enjoying for some 60 years now, even under trees, that President John “Paradigm-Shift” Dramani Mahama adamantly refuses to make accessible to Southern Ghanaians. The quality couldn’t have been that great, or could it?

The fact of the matter, though, is that since we Southerners contribute the elephant’s share of the nation’s revenue and human-power resources, isn’t it about time that we deservedly got bumped off the second-class citizens’ list?

Anyway, what brings me here is a terse news story that I just came across this evening while surfing the proverbial ’Net. The story regards the allegedly palpable absence of President John Agyekum-Kufuor, the country’s second democratically elected leader of the Fourth Republic, from the aforesaid presentation of President Mahama’s State of the Nation Address (See “Kufuor Attributes State of the Nation Address No-Show to Short Illness” Asempafm.com/Modernghana.com 1/4/13).

Well, since the old man has come out to categorically tell us of his curious intention to break ranks with the New Patriotic Party’s rather noble decision to unreservedly boycott Monday’s inauguration of the man who may well have “stolen” a whopping 1.3 million votes in order to have himself declared winner of Election 2012, I cannot either presume or pretend to be fretful about the fact that President Kufuor was, reportedly, prevented from attending Mr. Mahama’s State-of-the-Nation presentation at Parliament House by an unspecified illness.

Don’t get me wrong, I dearly love my Uncle Kofi Diawuo and fervidly pray almost every single day that he live to be a centenarian. Still, it stands to reason to jovially suppose – although I am well aware of the fact that this is no joking matter, whatsoever – that in knocking him down silly and preventing him from attending the Mahama presidential circus performance, God was giving Mr. Kufuor a teachable hint of the possibility of a worse Jonah-like wave that could well prematurely sweep him off the national political landscape, if he unwisely persists in flouting the laws of gravitational justice.

In essence, my contention here is simply that the Oxbridge-educated lawyer-economist and former front-row lawmaker in Ghana’s parliament does not do himself any good by gratuitously presuming to make himself a gaping nuisance and outright embarrassment to the members, supporters and sympathizers of the very party that made him the distinguished statesman and political giant that he is today, both in Ghana and continental Africa at large.

Personally, I feel that at the time of filing its suit challenging the legitimacy of the declaration of Mr. Mahama as winner of Election 2012, the New Patriotic Party operatives ought to have also petitioned the Supreme Court to injunct, or restrain, President-Elect Mahama from holding himself off as such till the highest court of the land has had ample time to deliberate on and decide who actually won Election 2012. As it stands, I am not particularly enthusiastic about the fact that the members of the Supreme Court will be in full-attendance and professionally bewigged and attired to participate in unarguably the most lurid dramaturgical travesty to be ever performed at Ghana’s Independence Square.

This is in no way to impugn the integrity of the learned and, for the most part, decent members of the highest court of the land. That unenviable bit has already been done by the impudent key operatives of the so-called National Democratic Congress. My well-founded worry, though, regards the moral burden of having to be forced by protocol to participate in such orgiastic travesty, heartily or perfunctorily, and then to be asked several days later to rule on the legitimacy or otherwise of the same.

I am very thankful that God, in His/ Her infinite wisdom saw it fit to swiftly and bluntly knock down Ghana’s proverbial giant with an as yet unspecified illness in order to prevent Mr. Kufuor from rather insensitively hurting the far greater collective cause of the New Patriotic Party for justice, fairness, transparency and accountability in the way that democracy ought to be practiced in Ghana.

“Are you thinking what I am thinking?” goes that popular American television commercial. You guessed right! I would like that crackerjack physician who examined my good, old Uncle Diawuo to call back, Caesarian fashion, and sternly warn him against the greater danger that could befall him, should he make the patently unwise decision to consort with the Satanic forces of the National Democratic Congress. Does the latter sound like the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to anybody? Well, if we fail to stop these STX scam-artists, we may well be getting a retrograde Nkrumaist version of Kim Jong-il (and now Kim Jong-un) on our heads and shoulders.

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
Jan. 4, 2013
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