Out of Office, President Rawlings Is Now a Political Moralist

A couple of days ago, a friend WhatsApp me a Youtube video clip in which former President Jerry John Rawlings could be seen self-righteously bitching about having been denied some $ 22,000 that he felt entitled to from his immediate successor, namely, President John Agyekum-Kufuor, to fly Mrs. Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings, Ghana’s longest-reigning First Lady, to Switzerland for the treatment of her widely known asthmatic wife. According to the self-righteous plaintiff, no medical facility in Ghana had the requisite equipment and expertise to administer the required therapy or treatment to his wife. On the Youtube video clip dispatched to me by Mr. Kwasi Ohene, of New York City and Akyem-Tumfa, Mr. Rawlings was bitterly telling the host of an Italian television program that former President Agyekum-Kufuor had no coequal on the African continent in the gross mistreatment of his political opponents, in particular, the man who peacefully handed over the reins of governance to the first Fourth-Republican New Patriotic Party-sponsored leader.

Now, I don’t know why as a handsomely salaried military dictator and an elected civilianized leader, former President Rawlings had not saved enough money for the medical treatment of his widely known to be chronically ill wife but, somehow, expected many an ordinary Ghanaian citizen to have been able to do so. You see, we are talking about a bloody junta leader who summarily and mercilessly executed several of his predecessors for merely borrowing, and not stealing from the public till or our national treasury, some GHȻ 50,000, apiece, roughly about $ 25,000, from the bank to build houses for themselves and their relatives and families. We must also quickly point out that according to one of his “revolutionary” or killing-machine operatives, the former Lance-Corporal Matthew Adabuga, following the Mafia-class execution of the three Akan-descended Accra High Court Judges, namely, Justices Cecilia Koranteng-Addow, Frederick Poku-Sarkodie and Kwadwo Agyei Agyepong, and the retired Ghana Army Major and former Personnel Manager of GIHOC – the Nkrumah-founded Ghana Industrial Holdings Corporation – Mr. and Mrs. Rawlings popped several bottles of champagne and heartily celebrated the barbaric murder of the Accra High Court Judges on the night of June 30, 1982.

In sum, we are not talking about a proverbial choir boy and his choir-girl high school sweetheart here. Rather, we are talking about a bloody terror-trucking couple here. They may very well deserve a modicum of our forgiveness, but I never go to bed thinking for a split-second that Mr. and Mrs. Rawlings deserve the sympathy of any morally upright Ghanaian citizen, except the sympathy of their own now-adult children and other close relatives and friends and associates of their long-orchestrated criminal activities. But what I found to be interrogatively necessary to probe is Chairman Rawlings’ inescapably vacuous self-preening assertion that he had actually turned around the economic fortunes of Ghana during the 20 years that he dominated our beloved country’s economic and sociocultural and political fortunes. And yet Chairman Rawlings does not seem to have ever dreamed or thought about the need for the construction and/or establishment of the one first-class hospital that could have taken good care of chronically ill Ghanaian citizens like his own wife, Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings, and had to fly the latter for medical treatment abroad for the same.

One can readily imagine the plight of the hundreds of thousands of indigent Ghanaian citizens who daily find themselves in the same stressful situation as Mrs. Agyeman-Rawlings, but who are absolutely unable to do anything about the same. As for his decidedly nonsensical twaddle about having to solicit the financial assistance of some foreign-resident friends and associates, the least said about the latter, the better. The fact of the matter is that Chairman Rawlings is a compulsive and a pathological liar whose word must always be taken with a pinch of salt. We all know, for instance, that it took the Keta-Sogakope Mafia Capo and half-Scottish Highlands native some 20 long years to openly acknowledge that he had, indeed, solicited and received the humongous payola sum of some $ 5 Million from late Nigerian strongman Gen. Sani Abacha, to do some dirty public relations stunt for the latter at the United Nations’ headquarters in New York City, and in the international community at large.

And then he had to be psychologically finessed by a Nigerian journalist to confess. And when he did, Mr. Rawlings only told half of the story, pathetically claiming that he had only taken home some $ 2 Million of the much-needed crispy and fresh-smelling cash from the payola brief case sent in by an Abacha courier and left the rest on a table in an office at the Osu Castle, the former seat of Ghana’s governance, to be divvied up by the Ahwoi Brothers and their friends and associates who, by the way, have flatly denied the same. This is, of course, perfectly in keeping with the NDC’s thoroughgoing culture of political scam-artistry. Could this self-flattering butcher be more morally righteous than Mr. John Agyekum-Kufuor? Go figure!

*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
February 9, 2019
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net