Martin Amidu Attempts to Make NDC Corruption Seem More Morally Acceptable than NPP Corruption – Part 1

I did not bother to read the characteristically patent prolix authored by Special Prosecutor-Manqué Martin A B K Amidu, because it was very predictable from the very first few sentences of his article, titled “The State Capture of the National Resources of the Achimota Forest Reserve by a Bi-Partisan Political Elite in Ghana: By Martin A. B. K. Amidu” (Ghanaweb.com 6/2/22), that the writer did not intend to level up with the Ghanaian people and the Ghanaian citizenry. Rather, the fired Attorney-General and Minister of Justice in the government of the late President John Evans Atta “Woyome” Mills intended to do propaganda politics with the very critical issue of official corruption in a way that made the grossly incompetent operatives of the country’s main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) appear to be relatively far less corrupt or payola prone than their main counterparts among the vanguard ranks of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP).

The first sign and evidence of Mr. Amidu’s being almost exclusively focused on and fixated with making the patently indefensible seem perfectly defensible is the author’s grossly misguided decision to dedicate his article “to the ideals of the June 4^th and 31^st December Revolutions and the 1992 Constitution,” which the miserably failed prosecutor of the accused scapegoats of the savage and barbaric decapitation of the Supreme Overlord of the Ancient Dagbon Kingdom, Yaa-Naa Yakubu Andani, II, and at least 40 other courtiers of the latter, deviously claims had “sought to preserve the natural resources of Ghana for the public benefit of its Chiefs and People.” First of all, other than its unspeakable savagery, there is absolutely no forensically provable evidence that the Chairman Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings-led Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC), architects of the so-called June 4^th Revolution contributed anything constructive or positive towards the socioeconomic development of Ghana.

Rather, as dozens of political scientists and crackerjack economists have since long authoritatively concluded, the four-month duration of the Rawlings Revolution, as the latter is also commonly known and called, resulted in irreparable damage to Ghana’s fragile but quite resilient economy and further complicated the economic development agenda of the democratically elected Dr. Hilla “Babini” Limann-led People’s National Party (PNP). Mr. Rawlings and Cousin Kojo Tsikata and the rest of their hoodlum pack of faux revolutionaries would, ironically, turn around to blame Dr. Limann for problems that had been largely and primarily created by the AFRC junta, such as the unilateral freezing of the prices of consumer products – in the name of commodity pricing stability or control prices – on the local market none of which were manufactured in the country.

You see, the very first problem that the men in khaki uniforms whose amateurish and socioeconomically warped ideas Mr. Amidu would have Ghanaians blindly and unreservedly celebrate had absolutely no appreciable understanding of the simple demand-and-supply dynamics of the kind of market economic system that existed in the country immediately prior to the eruption of the June 4^th Uprising. It was in the process of President Limann’s clairvoyant and visionary attempt to rectify this humongous damage wreaked on Ghana’s economy by the economically clueless operatives of the June 4^th Revolution, so-called, that Mr. Rawlings and Cousin Tsikata staged their second military putsch, commonly called the 31^st December Revolution. It was the latter bloody intervention in the civilized and democratic governance of the country that effectively collapsed Ghana’s economy from which the country would not be able to recover in the 10-year period from December 31, 1981, to the end of 1992.

Indeed, any serious student of Ghana’s political history over the last half century who desires a critical appreciation of what the terminology of “State Capture” truly means, would do well to begin such critical enquiry from the inception of the 20-year period during which Chairman Rawlings and Cousin Tsikata effectively dominated Ghana’s geopolitical terrain as a Maximum Diarchal Dictatorship. One finds it to be at once inescapably absurd and morally preposterous to hear some of the kleptocratic vanguard operatives of the National Democratic Congress and their hired party propaganda goons and lackeys smugly and cavalierly accuse President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo of running “a friends and family government.” In the 20 years of the Rawlings-Tsikata Diarchy, there was absolutely no question in the mind of any mature adult Ghanaian citizen that Anlo-Ewes were the equivalent of the expatriate operatives of the erstwhile British colonial government.

Not surprisingly, recently, when a disagreement flared up between the Akufo-Addo-led government of the New Patriotic Party and some chiefs and people in the southeastern border township of Aflao, in Ghana’s Volta Region, the putative Anlo-Ewe Mafia Headquarters and stronghold of the National Democratic Congress, some of these chiefs and local rulers and community leaders were widely reported to have bitterly and wistfully complained about the fact that less than a generation ago, Ghana had literally been envisaged as the proverbial “oyster” of the Anlo-Ewe ethnic group or polity. It may very well be in a nostalgic attempt to take over and reprise the apocalyptic era of the Rawlings Revolution that inspired Mr. Oliver Barker-Vormawor, the Oxbridge-schooled self-infatuated convener of the #FixTheCountry movement, to demand the summary overthrow of the Akufo-Addo-led government of the New Patriotic Party and the immediate replacement of the latter with a Rawlings-inspired junta.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

June 4, 2022

E-mail: okoampaahoofekwame@gmail.com