The Road to Kigali – Part 9

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

In the past, when they operated under the de facto military guise of the so-called Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), all they had to do was dispatch armed soldiers with masks in the thick of darkness and abduct their victims for “revolutionary justice” by summarily executing them Mafia style. In most instances, their victims were of Akan majority extraction. This is what most narratives of the history of the so-called National Democratic Congress (NDC) deliberately fail to retail. And significantly, it is a studious appreciation of this fact that accounts for the purportedly exclusivist “Akanness” of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP).

In sum, rather than being erroneously perceived as the especial preserve of Akans with elitist pretensions, the New Patriotic Party is actually the refuge center of the largely politically and militarily vulnerable successful Akans who constituted the near-exclusive brunt of P/NDC persecution between 1980 and 1992. In ethnic composition, the NPP is fundamentally no different from the NDC, as both parties have Akan-descended Ghanaians as their majority membership. That the NDC has widely come to be envisaged as a party of ethnic minorities is far more a matter of strategy than a functional reality.

Still, the defining moment for the New Patriotic Party as an economic and ideological enterprise dawned on June 30, 1982, when three Ghanaian high court judges, all of Akan ethnicity, were abducted and summarily executed in a remote enclave of the Accra Plains. His vehement protestations to the contrary, it would shortly be revealed by a high-powered, or rather a high-profiled, commission of investigators that, indeed, the then-Chairman Jerry John Rawlings and his national security adviser, Capt. Kojo Tsikata, had viciously orchestrated this dastardly act of unpardonable savagery.

What was also remarkable about the June 30th Mafia-style execution of the judges was the fact that almost each and every one of the assassins belonged to the Ewe, Ga and other non-Akan ethnic groups. In other words, it was clearly a flagrant act of “ethnic cleansing” by which event Messrs. Rawlings and Tsikata and their associates, including some treacherous lame-brained Akan-descended Ghanaians, of course, intended to “pacify” the country’s ethnic majority, then widely perceived and still perceived as a veritable threat to the political domination of the national landscape by these ethnic minorities. This is the story that needs to be strategically and comprehensively articulated as a means of reminding unsuspecting Ghanaians of the terrorist nature and agenda of the key operatives of the National Democratic Congress.

Recently, the NDC has taken its regressive agenda of divide-and-conquer the Akan ethnic majority to a new low level of bribery and corruption of their victims, who have been tragically made to falsely feel to be an active and integral part of a purportedly inclusive national development agenda whose beneficence has yet to be objectively recognized and appreciated. The problem of the non-Akan key operatives of the NDC thus clearly appears to be the flat and adamant refusal of the cream of Akan society to blindly and foolishly buy into the slavishly wicked and nihilistic agenda of the Rawlings posse.

Needless to say, Mr. Rawlings clearly seems to fully appreciate the proverbial handwriting on the wall, thus his clarion call for an immediate investigation of the electoral irregularities that saw Caretaker-President John Dramani Mahama’s declaration by the Chairman of the Electoral Commission as the winner of Election 2012.

Even as it fervidly prepares to file a petition vehemently challenging the Mahama-Afari Gyan Travesty, members and supporters of the New Patriotic Party have, literally, swamped the streets of Ghana’s two largest cities, namely, Accra and Kumasi. The protesters have vowed not to abandon their cause until justice is seen to have prevailed in the matter of Mahama and Akufo-Addo.

Predictably, the Mahama government’s response has been to nervously threaten the leaders of its most formidable institutional challenger, the New Patriotic Party, with summary arrests and indefinite incarceration. And equally predictably, the NPP leadership has not hesitated to promptly fire back. Last week, the NPP’s General-Secretary, Mr. Kwadwo Owusu-Afriyie (aka Sir John), threatened President Mahama and his gang of usurpers with total political chaos if any such undemocratic use of the coercive apparatus of the state was invoked.

“If they make the wrong move by arresting any of our officers, they will know no peace and this country will suffer for that.” Mr. Owusu-Afriyie further added: “We are not scared to be arrested; but if they try to arrest any of us, we will make this country ungovernable.”

Now, those are no lily-livered words, were my dear reader to ask me.

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D. Department of English Nassau Community College of SUNY Garden City, New York Dec. 18, 2012 ###