They Did the Same to Paa Willie, Once Upon a Time

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

It was characteristically and morbidly an NDC display all right. Morbid and theatrically primitive and barbaric. No surprises here, of course. After all, isn’t the National Democratic Congress (NDC) a political juggernaut of state-of-nature caliber whose barbaric “revolutionary” leadership has a track-record that would put even Dracula to shame?

And, of course, the man at the head of the table of this repulsive feast of cannibals was none other than the petty Gonja chieftain architect of “Shit-Bombing” from the scrubby township of Bole-Bamboi. And he has the fetid rhetorical lilt to commend him to the same. Which is why it was all the more to be expected that he would parade a gang of sociocultural and morally rancid “deplorables” – my profuse apologies to Candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton – carrying a casket pasted all over with electioneering campaign posters sporting the image of his most formidable political opponent, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, the man whom a remarkable number of Ghanaians firmly believe handily defeated him in the 2012 presidential polls, but for the capricious whims of a wishy-washy and executive-toadying Supreme Court luridly packed with NDC-molded human vermin.

There is something eerily and unmistakably sinister at play here. Even the founding patriarch of the NDC, Mr. Dracula himself, does not trust this petty-minded political copycat whom he once personally knighted as chief executive of the shit-bombing squad. And it is the fact that symbolically speaking, the crass and brazen display and parading of the casket pasted all over with campaign posters of Akufo-Addo strikingly harks back to the sanguinary circumstances leading to the suspicious demise of the former boss and immediate predecessor of this most scandalously naked of postcolonial Ghanaian leaders who is criminally oblivious of the same. The man is butt-naked and hopelessly power drunk, as one of my pre-pubertal sons is fond of saying, often in reference to Mr. Donald J. Trump, the half-Scottish and half-German Republican Party’s candidate for President of the United States.

Even the Ultimatefmonline.com reporter was palpably at a loss as to what this most repulsive parade of a casket decked with the campaign posters of Nana Akufo-Addo could possibly mean, that is, other than its being that fervid season of Ghana’s political calendar when the offspring of Dracula go hunting for human blood for the retching performance of a blood-bath for Comrade Shit-Bomber. This at once most criminal and savage ritual appears to be fast becoming a tradition. Still, what piqued my interest and attention more than anything else was the inexcusably farcical decision by the Shit-Bomber to don the garish ceremonial outfit of a junta general the other day, that made him strikingly resemble a deftly uglified version of the Rawlings-slain General Ignatius Kutu Acheampong. I intend to pick up this morbid subject of “Kaakaamotobi” that made the Gonja pettey chieftain seem like a lily-livered masquerader out to spook some toddlers some unnamed somewhere.

Of course, the NDC robber-barons can afford such comical display of gross ill-breeding because they have more than their fair share of pelf to gorge themselves tipsy and silly on, even while nearly half of all Ghanaian youths go to bed on growlingly empty stomachs practically every night. Yes, nearly a full-half of all Ghanaian youths are jobless! Not that many of these highly educated and skilled and able-bodied youths haven’t tried to secure jobs of which they are more than qualified. It has all been decidedly to no avail, nearly every one of such searches, that is. But then, what does one expect when murderous kleptocrats are hogging the helm of our beloved nation’s affairs? You see, for the children and grandchildren of Dracula, the blood of one man, no matter how pachydermous in stature, is not enough; thus their strategically foolhardy hunt for the undrinkable blood of their fiercest opponent. This sardonic mockery of the health condition of the one man who is the most advantageously placed and poised to snatching the ill-acquired mandate of the people from the Shit-Bomber and his minions and hangers-on will, of course, come to naught. For they have picked on the wrong target. They woefully lack what the legendary and immortalized Spanish poet, playwright and theater director Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936) called DUENDE, that providential animating spirit of inimitable creativity.

Even as Mr. Mustapha Hamid, the Akufo-Addo spokesman, wrote on his Facebook Wall recently, in the wake of the NDC’s manifesto-launching circus act in the Brong-Ahafo regional capital of Sunyani, this coffin parade of party ragamuffins was tantamount to the most reckless exhibition of “crass buffoonery” of the highest order. Maybe somebody more levelheaded ought to remind these casket carriers about the wickedly ironic story of Alhaji Imoro Egala and Mr. William “Paa Willie” Ofori-Atta and that most regally mellifluous musical parody called “Osu Cemetery.” “Living is seeing,” a famous madman is widely quoted to have said.

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