Which Danquah Committee, Murtala?

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

It is becoming more comical and interesting than I initially envisaged. After maliciously, mischievously, peevishly and farcically claiming that Dr. J. B. Danquah died of natural causes at the Nsawam Medium-Security Prison in February 1965, Mr. Murtala Mohammed is also now claiming, rather lamely, that the criminally mendacious statement that he made on the august floor of Ghana's National Assembly "was based on the findings of the committee which investigated the circumstances leading to the death" of the erudite and famous constitutional lawyer and undisputed dean of the post-World War II anti-colonial struggle that led to the political liberation of the erstwhile Gold Coast from British imperialist domination (See "Murtala Tells... Ghana Is Not a Jungle" MyJoyOnline.com / Ghanaweb.com 2/12/14).

The tribally scarified Mr. Mohammed who, unfortunately, also doubles as a Deputy Information Minister, had better inform his audience exactly the findings of which investigative committee mandated to enquire into the death of Dr. Danquah he is referring to. He also needs to cite specific references by the purported committee pointing to the fact of Dr. Danquah's death having been clinically attributed to "natural causes." If he cannot name the committee he is talking about, then, of course, the National Democratic Congress' Member of Parliament for Nanton would be better off shutting up and stop pretending as if most Ghanaians were congenital cretins.

And if he truly believes that viciously and mischievously fabricating the circumstances surrounding the death of Dr. Danquah was not done by him out of sheer malice, then it goes without saying that Mr. Mohammed is in dire and immediate need of psychiatric examination. I wouldn't, however, go as far as to suggest that the Deputy Information Minister is deserving of some form of corporal punishment or physical discipline, though it is perfectly understandable that someone else would suggest the same. Then also, maybe somebody ought to inform Mr. Mohammed that this is the age of the Internet and Google, when instant factual verification gives absolutely no wiggle room to pathological liars like the Deputy Information Minister.

It is also tantamount to a scandalous act of criminality, of the highest order, for Mr. Mohammed to cynically imply that, somehow, it is far more decent to prevaricate on the question of the circumstances surrounding Dr. Danquah's death before any group of Ghanaian children, than it is to call for the immediate sanctioning of such a vicious and malicious political sponge, or parasite. And, by the way, what is so "shameful" and "disgusting" about the morally sound advocacy of the exacting of instant "corporal accountability" from government operatives like Mr. Mohammed who are hell-bent on unconscionably falsifying the history of Ghanaian politics, in hopes of perpetuating the kind of academic and cultural Talibanism which the Rawlings-led Provisional/National Democratic Congress (P/NDC) has been doggedly pursuing for more than 30 years now.

I also don't know that the P/NDC has not already converted our beloved country into the kind of "jungle" that Mr. Mohammed pretends to be decrying, only because his ardent political opponents are beginning to wise up to the imperative need to paying back the rabble-rousing professional executioners of the P/NDC in kind.

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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
Feb. 13, 2014
E-mail: [email protected]
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