Oti Minister Makubu Is Right on Target Re June 4th Trees

Following the call by Mr. Joshua Makubu, the Oti Region’s Minister, for trees planted by operatives of the country’s main opposition political party, the National Democratic Congress (NDC), in commemoration of the brutal political savagery that was the so-called June 4, 1979, Revolution, led by the late Chairman Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings, later democratically elected President of Ghana, to be removed or uprooted forthwith, Mr. Manasseh Azure Awuni, the nationally renowned investigative journalist and, lately, editor of a newsmagazine called The Fourth Estate, was also reported to have called on Minister Makubu to order the immediate uprooting of all trees planted under the President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo-launched Green Ghana Tree-Planting Campaign (See “Uproot Green Ghana Trees If You Want NDC’s June 4 Trees Removed – Manasseh Blasts Oti Minister” Modernghana.com 6/14/22).

Mr. Awuni’s retaliatory or vengeful call for the removal of the Green Ghana Trees is what Americans are apt to liken to an incongruent comparison between apples and oranges. Which simply means that while, indeed, apples and oranges are both edible fruits, they are not exactly one and the same. Mr. Awuni is rather much too young to remember the apocalyptic events that culminated in what commonly and globally came to be known as the June 4^th Uprising and, in Ghana and among the leadership of the short-lived Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC), the June 4 Revolution. It would be subsequently institutionalized as a National Holiday by the late Chairman Rawlings, following the latter’s overthrow of the democratically elected government of the late President Hilla “Babini” Limann – aka Dr. Hilla Limann – and his People’s National Party (PNP).

To be certain, Mr. Manasseh Azure Awuni was not even born at the time of the wanton and brutal savagery that came to be routinely and synonymously associated with June 4^th. It was in the wake of the second successful military putsch by Chairman Rawlings and his Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) junta, on December 31, 1981, that created a romanticized albeit patently false and ignoble glorification of June 4^th. Even so, if he had paid sedulous attention to what the leader and putative architect of the June 4^th Uprising himself had to say, innumerable times, about the Great Regret that was June 4^th, Mr. Awuni would have unreservedly come to a perfect agreement with the Oti Regional Minister.

The fact of the matter is that by the eve of his epochal transition into eternity, the lead-architect of the June 4^th Revolution had maturely, patriotically and definitively come to the objective and truthful conclusion that June 4^th had been a veritable political and historical nuisance that had not or did not significantly contribute to the political and economic development and/or the moral uplift of the Ghanaian people. In particular, Chairman Rawlings publicly and disconsolately lamented the fact that, ultimately, June 4^th had created some irredeemably reprobate or morally reprehensible political characters who were far worse than “The general that I personally executed.”

Equally, significantly, Chairman Rawlings had gone on record to have ruefully observed that while some vintage products of his political and ideological mentorship, like the late President John Evans Atta “Woyome” Mills, were a great disappointment, on the whole, nevertheless, it was former President John “European Airbus Payola” Dramani Mahama who most typified the rank and abject corruption that had become the invariable hallmark and trademark of the very top leadership of the National Democratic Congress, of which ideological and political establishment the late former President has been incontestably credited. Ironically, Mr. Awuni envisages former President Mahama to be the ideal template and benchmark symbol of media tolerance in Fourth-Republican Ghana, even as the former Senior Correspondent of the Joy-FM and the Multimedia telecommunications network has caustically excoriated and called the human rights credentials and the leadership integrity of the twice-elected President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo into serious question.

Now, it cannot be gainsaid that the million-plus trees planted under the auspices of the Green Ghana Campaign, unlike the planting of the June 4^th trees at the Nkawkaw Community Senior High School in the Oti Region, is not politically tinged or colored by the neoliberal free-market ideology of the ruling New Patriotic Party. So, there is an oceanic magnitude of difference here although, in principle, this writer sees absolutely nothing wrong with the salutary reafforestation of our increasingly tree-logging-endangered forestry resources. The fact of the matter is that labeling some recently cultivated trees “Green Ghana Trees” or “June 4^th Trees” would not take anything away from the unmistakable environmental rejuvenation of the land for the long-term benefit of posterity and even the youths of today.

But the question of whether because many Ghanaians who initially backed the Presidency of Nana Akufo-Addo may have become fatigued or emotionally and psychologically disaffected by the widely perceived lackluster performance of the current government is totally irrelevant and a rather preposterous pretext or basis upon which Mr. Awuni would base his retaliatory or vengeful call for the uprooting – he calls it the “removal” – of the Green Ghana Campaign Trees. The indelible fact of the matter is that Nana Akufo-Addo is a twice-elected President of the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana. One does not get democratically elected President two consecutive times for being the kind of grossly incompetent leader that Mr. Awuni would have his readers and audiences believe President Akufo-Addo is or has become. And what is more, insulting the intelligence of the Ghanaian electorate and the citizenry does not the least bit further the warped logic of his clearly grossly misguided argument.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

June 14, 2022

E-mail: [email protected]