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18.11.2021 Feature Article

NDC: The Party of Uncompleted Projects – Part 1

NDC: The Party of Uncompleted Projects – Part 1
18.11.2021 LISTEN

If any critically thinking observer or student of Ghanaian politics over the past 40 years wanted to gauge the veritable nuisance that is the so-called Rawlings Tradition, manifested by the 19-year tandem regimes of the late Chairman Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings-led Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) and the National Democratic Congress (NDC), the most salient measure is undoubtedly the Keta Defense Seawall or Levee. For the 20 years that the Rawlings-Tsikata Diarchy literally and extortionately ruled the roost, the people of the Keta littoral and its environs were effectively left at the mercy of the vagaries of the raw elements of Nature and the sea, namely, the Atlantic Ocean or the Gulf of Guinea, to be exact.

The Keta Tidal Wave Menace is an age-old periodic hazard that has been raging for generations and centuries. It has unsettled and uprooted hundreds of thousands of generations of residents on the eastern flank of the Volta River; and a lot has been written about this seemingly intractable natural disaster-prone area. The finest and most famous poem to be written about this catastrophic conundrum was, however, not authored by an Anlo-Ewe indigene or denizen. It was written by an Akan-Ghanaian citizen of Fante ethnicity by the name of Kwesi Brew, from the Cape Coast-Saltpond-Anomabu littoral, titled “The Sea Eats Our Land.” This poem inimitably captures the anguish of the people of Keta. I am intimately familiar with “The Sea Eats Our Land” because I wrote a significant portion of a chapter of my doctoral dissertation on the “Blues Poetry” of Mr. Brew, who, by the way, was also the first Ghanaian to be named his country’s Ambassador to Russia, at the time called The Soviet Union (or The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) – The USSR.

Kwesi Brew (1928-2007) wrote and published several more pieces about the Keta Tidal Wave Conundrum. On another level, it is not as intractable a menace as it has effectively and almost invariably been made to appear. It is simply a striking reflection of the abject lack of responsible leadership on the part of Ghanaian politicians in general but, most especially, politicians and the leadership of the Rawlings-Tsikata Diarchy and Tradition. That the eponymous leaders of the latter political wave hailed from the Keta-Anloga Littoral, makes this problem all the more outrageous and scandalous. You see, the very first serious attempt to arrest the Keta Tidal Wave Menace was undertaken by an ethnic Akan of Asante subethnicity by the name of Mr. John Agyekum-Kufuor, the immediate democratically elected successor of Messrs. Rawlings and Capt. (Ret.) Kojo Tsikata, a cashiered and dishonorably discharged junior officer of the Ghana Armed Forces (GAF) during the tenure of President Kwame Nkrumah and cousin to the half-Scottish Chairman Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings.

It was the John Agyekum-Kufuor-led government of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) that commenced what has been called the First Phase of the construction of the Keta Seawall. Mr. Rawlings would virulently and vituperatively accuse the then-President Kufuor of being an unconscionable “Asante Imperialist” who was rabidly fixated on reducing the Anlo-Ewe people of Ghana to an insufferable status of servility. This accusation was leveled in the waning days of the Kufuor Administration, sometime between late 2008 and early 2009, when President Kufuor dispatched a platoon of soldiers to Anloga, the traditional head-seat or capital of the Anlo-Ewe State, to quell a bloody internecine power struggle within the Anloga Royal Family. This latter situation strikingly recalls the 2012 Presidential Election Campaign Season, when Candidate John “Brazil Embraer” Dramani Mahama sternly cautioned Candidate Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo that the latter had absolutely no right to discuss or talk about the imperative need and necessity to significantly improve the living standards of the “Kayayo,” the largely northern Ghana-descended female head porters who plied their marginally remunerated service trade in southern Ghanaian towns and cities, whose welfare the northern-born and Gonja-descended Candidate Mahama imperiously claimed to be his special preserve.

Well, here we are a dozen years on, and it is absolutely no secret that the now-President Akufo-Addo has done far more to improve the lives of the Kayayo and the ordinary Ghanaian citizenry, in general, than could be said in favor of the crushingly failed three-time Presidential Candidate of the National Democratic Congress. Now, what we want to highlight here is that, in the evergreen words of Associate Supreme Court Justice Mr. Jones M. Dotse, short of blindly looting our National Treasury, the leadership of the Jerry John Rawlings-founded National Democratic Congress has absolutely nothing worthwhile or meaningful to offer the Ghanaian people. The apocalyptic failure to protect the people of Keta and its vicinity from the deadly ravages of tidal waves is an indelible scar on the conscience of Kwame Gonja and the entire leadership of the National Democratic Congress, that is, assuming that, indeed, the leadership of the faux-socialist and self-styled “social democratic” leadership of the so-called Umbrella Party have been wonderously endowed with the cherished human capacity for conscientious thinking.

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

November 16, 2021

E-mail: [email protected]

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