Nunoo-Mensah Is an Epic Failure Who Needs to Keep Quiet

Nunoo-Mensah

As he steadily and inexorably inches into his 84-year milestone, Retired Brigadier-General Joseph Nunoo-Mensah, the former Chief-of-the-Defense-Staff of the Ghana Armed Forces, may be taking stock of his life, looking back to the painful realization that his impressive military pips, epaulets, medals and all, notwithstanding, that he has, indeed achieved little that is worthwhile and may yet leave a legacy that lacks substance and that only very few of his countrymen and women, especially those who know and care a diddly little about what real generals do would admire and respect. Which, of course, is not the least bit to imply that, indeed, General Nunoo-Mensah has, in his time, been a real general or even one that was worth his rank and designation in practice.

Which may very well explain why the Winneba-born political gigolo, or the moral equivalent of a political prostitute, has been desperately looking around to get just the right kind of leader and government to conveniently scapegoat for all the crimes that he and the Jerry John Rawlings-led junta of the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), as well as the Rawlings-led faux-socialist – actually veritably populist – albeit democratically elected bloody establishment of the so-called National Democratic Congress (NDC) have ignominiously and wantonly perpetrated against the longsuffering people of Ghana. He says that he weeps for Ghana but, of course, he would be far better off weeping for himself (See “ ‘Why I Weep for Ghana’ – Nunoo-Mensah makes Worrying Revelations of [about?] the State of Ghana” Modernghana.com 10/31/20).

I mean, and I have said this before innumerable times in the past: What kind of General follows a Flight-Lieutenant or a Captain of the Ghana Airforce to recklessly and needlessly plunge his own motherland or beloved nation into chaos and apocalyptic economic destruction? And then not having wreaked such wanton destruction and atrocities to his fill, haughtily demand to be allowed to become a significant member and player of the very political establishment he so conveniently and opportunistically abandoned when the going got extremely tough? Yes, that is the shady and unmistakable political profile of the man who was one of the first pupils of the Winneba Presbyterian Primary School, which my immortalized but woefully unsung but, nevertheless, indisputably heroic maternal grandfather, The Reverend Theodore Henry (Yawbe) Sintim-Aboagye, of Akyem-Asiakwa and Akyem-Begoro, helped to found in King Ghartey’s township of The Windy Bay in 1945.

In his biographical profile, General Nunoo-Mensah would hurriedly note that he only attended the Winneba Presbyterian Primary School for just one year, and then the Methodist Presbytery, today Bishopric, Parish or Diocese, opened its own school to which he was promptly transferred and attended. Psychologically speaking, this is probably when General Nunoo-Mensah’s much-remarked nasty streak of blind opportunism began. And he has been staunchly and doggedly pursuing this primrose career path of unprincipled opportunism well into his 80s.

In the news report referenced above, General Nunoo-Mensah rather farcically and lamely attempts to fault the short-lived democratically elected KA Busia-led Progress Party (PP) government for Ghana’s precipitous industrial regression and collapse; but, of course, the unvarnished and indisputable fact of the matter is that the history of Ghana’s real “De-Industrialization” began with the Chairman Jeremiah John Rawlings-led junta of the so-called Provisional National Defense Council, in the Dark-Age Period that was euphemistically and deceptively dubbed by Western economics experts as the Era of the Structural Adjustment Program (SAP).

That was when every meaningful feature of our country’s development was deliberately and systematically collapsed, with the collusive collaboration of the Aryan Supremacists of the West who ran and still run the Bretton-Woods establishment, otherwise known as the World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). That was also when our Know-Nothing and Do-Absolutely-Nothing Ghanaian leaders, largely khaki-uniformed and gun-toting rascals, were instructed, military command fashion, to downsize and effectively dismantle the Kwame Nkrumah-established Ghana Industrial Holdings Corporation (GIHOC), a comprehensive umbrella of some 100 factories, because Ghana was, somehow, advancing too fast, in the jaundiced opinion of the aforesaid Aryan Supremacists, for a Third-World Country and an economy of scarcely 8 million people.

General Nunoo-Mensah knows this story very well because he was one of the key operatives of the executioners of such nation-wrecking project. He was also a significant member and operative of the military machine that effectively destroyed Ghana’s Judicial System through the cold-calculated Anlo-Ewe-led systematically orchestrated project of Anti-Akan Ethnic-Cleansing Exercise. Now, the man who was justifiably denied the undeserved right to parasitically profit from the political fortunes of the Akufo-Addo-led government of the New Patriotic Party would have Ghanaians believe that Ghana’s age-old economic development headaches have their unique cause or origin in the inimitably visionary and very progressive decision by a genius and administratively unrivalled President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo to convert the state-owned landed property of the Trade Fair Site into the most commercially beneficial and viable enterprise on the African Continent.

Somebody needs to ask our Arm-Chair Brigadier-General, precisely who introduced the Chinese-made Changfang machine operated environmentally destructive and primitive industrial culture of Galamsey into the country? Was it President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo or Chairman Jerry John Agbotui Rawlings? I mean, what kind of General, who really earned his epaulettes and pips the hard way, follows a Flight-Lieutenant into a National Economy-Demolition Exercise?

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

October 31, 2020

E-mail: [email protected]