Owusu Bempah, Nana Konadu Rawlings Is No Feminist Beacon

Mr. Ernest Kofi Owusu Bempah’s rejoining article captioned “Re: Jane Naana Opoku-Agyemang’s Nomination – A Victory for Inclusive Participatory Democracy” (Modernghana.com 7/12/20), makes for fascinating reading but it replicates the same false feminist agenda that it claims to be seeking to rectify. The article is subtitled as an “Open Letter to All Feminist Groups.” We must, first of all, get one thing clear and immediately out of the way; and it is this weird and farcical notion that, somehow, the “Conjugal Megalomania” of Ghana’s longest-reigning former First Lady, Nana Konadu Agyemang-Rawlings, can be equated with the collective push for a healthy women’s empowerment in the country’s political culture.

This is the very woman that Cpl. Matthew Adabuga, of the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) infamy, has reliably testified was actively involved in the brutal assassination of the three Accra High Court Judges, namely, Justices Cecilia Koranteng-Addow, Kwadwo Agyei Agyepong and Fred Poku-Sarkodie. Cpl. Adabuga has also told the nation, in an interview, that Chairman Rawlings and Nana Konadu Agyemang popped champagne on the night of the brutal Amedeka-led Mafia-style execution of the judges, including the savage butchering of Mrs. Cecilia Koranteng-Addow, at the time of her slaying a nursing mother. No such scandalous assertion could be more preposterous.

As well, the 2011 vindictive and petulant challenge by the morbidly henpecked Chairman Jerry John Rawlings, in Sunyani, capital of the former Brong-Ahafo Region, to have Mr. Rawlings’ wife rudely replace the then visibly ailing substantive President John Evans Atta-Mills, because the latter had failed to jail some indicted John Agyekum-Kufuor cabinet and executive appointees from the previous regime, had absolutely nothing to do with the collective empowerment of Ghanaian women in the political arena. It was a patently primitive coup attempt that was aimed at creating the Rawlings Dynasty, long predicted by Ghana’s longest-reigning strongman since the 1980s.

Now, I don’t know how old Mr. Owusu Bempah is today, but in an interview with a BBC Reporter, the then-Chairman Rawlings categorically asserted that he was determined to rule Ghana for some twenty years, after which period he intended to cede the reins of governance to his wife Nana Konadu Agyemang-Rawlings. You see, a country that just retired the longest-serving Chief Justice, in the majestic personality of Mrs. Georgina Theodora Wood, and the latter’s immediate successor, to wit, Ms. Sophia Akuffo, ought not to be pretending that the political “Spare-Tire” that is the post of Vice-President, actually in our present discourse the Vice-Presidential Candidate or Presidential Running-Mate of the testosterone-charged National Democratic Congress (NDC), is an enviable position for which any well-educated and cognitively puissant woman ought to be spoiling for or aspiring towards.

Indeed, to fully appreciate the much-purported genuine appreciation by the leaders of the National Democratic Congress for the empowerment of Ghanaian women, one only needs to critically examine the perennial short-shrift treatment and plain sexual harassment afforded retired Chief Justice Georgina Wood in both the infamous case of the Montie Trio / Montie Three of the Mahama-supporting would-be rapists of Justice Wood and the primary context in which this veritable act of state-sponsored terrorism was unleashed and stage-managed by the Mahama-led government of the National Democratic Congress, in particular the leading role played by female cabinet appointees of the Mahama regime, including Prof. Jane Naana Opoku-Agyemang, the recently named Mahama running-mate.

As well, the international diplomatic contretemps caused the Ghanaian people during his final Parliamentary State of the Nation Address (SONA), when Mr. Koku Anyidoho, the Atta-Mills Speechwriter and Director of Communications at the Atta-Mills Presidency at the time, deliberately omitted the name and title of Chief Justice Georgina T. Wood in his opening salutatory address. That is precisely how supportive the key operatives of the National Democratic Congress have been towards the empowerment of women in Ghanaian society. Legend even has it that several times during her 10-odd-year tenure, Chief Justice Wood came very close to tendering her resignation to both the Atta-Mills- and the Mahama-led governments of the National Democratic Congress. Now, this is what all progressively minded Ghanaian voters need to be discussing in the leadup to the 2020 Presidential Election.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

July 12, 2020

E-mail: [email protected]