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Go Through Your Aides, Nana Konadu?

Feature Article Nana Konadu Agyemang-Rawlings: Leader, NDP
JUN 28, 2016 LISTEN
Nana Konadu Agyemang-Rawlings: Leader, NDP

I don’t know why Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings thinks that she is any more morally upright than the man whom her own husband nurtured and tutored to become the thoroughgoing corrupt man that President John Dramani Mahama indubitably is today (See “Konadu Faults Mahama for Accepting Ford Gift” MyJoyOnline.com/Ghanaweb.com 6/27/16).

Not very long ago, at least if you are my age or older, Ghana’s longest-reigning first lady was posed the question as to how she had managed to school all her four, or so, children in some of the most expensive academies abroad, in view of her incredulous claim that in spite of their protracted grip onto power and influence the Rawlings clan was not nearly half as wealthy as both their admirers and detractors had made them out to be.

Back then, as I vividly recall, Mrs. Agyeman-Rawlings claimed that it was the generosity of some well-heeled close family friends and associates that had enabled her and her husband to ship their children abroad for schooling, even as Chairman Jerry John Rawlings deliberately and systematically ground the steady growth and healthy development of the country’s higher education to a screeching halt. Today, these bloody couple are lauded by those who don’t know any better, or willfully refuse to know any better, as having significantly contributed to the development of education, in general, in the country.

On the Mahama Ford Expedition payola saga, Mrs. Rawlings does not really condemn the former National Democratic Congress’ Member of Parliament for Gonja-West, in the Northern Region. Rather, her only beef is that rather than crudely deal directly with the alleged “gift” giver, Monsieur Gibril (Djibril) Kanazoe, the former Atta-Mills arch-lieutenant ought to have directed the Burkinabe contractor to pass the “gift” through one of his legion aides, even as Nana Konadu’s own father would have done.

Such backdoor strategy, Nana Konadu is implicitly convinced, would have helped in dispelling any semblance of a conflict of interest. A rather lame and belated advice, if the dear reader were to ask yours truly. If, indeed, that was the real nature of the evidently shady dealings of her own father, Mr. Agyeman, then one could safely conclude that Nana Konadu was raised by a man who was absolutely no morally better or superior to President Mahama. I am also inclined to believe that if he was afforded ample prodding, Ghanaians may likely learn about more than a few instances in which Chairman Rawlings might have been the jolly recipient of “generous” payolas.

At any rate, I found her hypothetical supposition of what a real gift to Mr. Mahama might have looked like to be at once insufferably repugnant and immitigably offensive. Why, for instance, would Nana Konadu suppose that a gift meant for Mr. Mahama would have been passed up to him somewhere in the Bole-Bamboi vicinity, in the Northern Region, and not in either Accra or Kumasi, for that matter?

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