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13.08.2022 Feature Article

President Mills Was a Woyome-Sponsoring Kleptocrat

President Mills Was a Woyome-Sponsoring Kleptocrat
13.08.2022 LISTEN

I have written and published dozens and reams of columns and news articles about the decidedly repulsive political and administrative underbelly of the late President John Evans Atta “Woyome” Mills over the past 10 years, that is, in the “mysterious” wake of his passing as the very first Sitting-President to have expired in Ghana’s Fourth Republic. So, it comes as absolutely nothing short of the patently risible and downright absurd to learn about somebody who goes by the inescapably obtrusive name of Mr. Samuel Atta Mills, vehemently decrying and pooh-poohing the Akufo-Addo Administration for what this alleged blood relative of the late President reportedly claims to be the “sacrilegious” desecration of the accidental tomb of President Mills by the latter’s extant Communications Director, Mr. Koku Anyidoho, the former Deputy General-Secretary of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), who also presently serves as Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the John Evans Atta-Mills Institute, located in the Central Regional Capital of Cape Coast (See “Is There No Sensible Person in Akufo-Addo Government to Remind [the] Leadership [about] the Dignity of the Dead? Samuel Atta Mills” Modernghana.com 7/20/22).

First of all, if relatives of the late President like Mr. Samuel Atta Mills who, we are also told, is the National Democratic Congress-sponsored Member of Parliament for the Komenda-Edina-Eguafo-Abirem (KEEA) Constituency, in the Central Region, really cared about Akan tradition and customary practices or culture, this pack of European miseducated pack of hoodlums would not have so nonchalantly and passively looked on while their most famous and distinguished scion was buried on what is putatively reckoned by conservative Akan traditionalists as “a strange land.” You see, nearly every past President or Head of State of Ghana was buried in his hometown or ancestral village, the same case and situation prevails right here in the United States of America, by the way, with the special or unique exception of postcolonial Ghana’s very first President, namely, Honorary Doctor Kwame Nkrumah. But even on the latter count needs to be promptly added the fact that the immortalized President Nkrumah had originally been buried in his maternal ancestral home village of Nkroful, in the Western Region.

As yours truly vividly recalls, it was a visiting Japanese Prime Minister, on an official tour of the country, about 10 years after the demise of Continental Africa’s most celebrated leader of the twentieth century, who wisely advised that the tomb of the legendary Pan-Africanist Spearhead be relocated to our nation’s capital of Accra, largely for the convenience of visiting Heads of States and Governments and other globally renowned and distinguished dignitaries, visiting the country who wished to pay their respects at the tomb of Ghana’s first postcolonial leader. Recently, however, I have begun to have second thoughts about this entire idea of having the mortal remains of the proverbial African Show Boy relocated to Accra and to the very grounds on which the then 48-year-old American-educated firebrand anti-colonialist stood on the night of March 5, 1957 to euphorically declare the erstwhile Gold Coast Colony’s reassertion of her sovereignty from British colonial imperialism.

Now, what I mean by beginning to have second thoughts about the decision by the Chairman Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings-led junta of the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) to relocate the mortal remains of the late former President Kwame Nkrumah from the latter’s ancestral home village of Nzema-Nkroful to Ghana’s capital of Accra, has primarily to do with the fact that this decision was, in retrospect, taken purely for the convenience of the afore-referenced visiting Japanese Prime Minister, as well as for the convenience of all other foreign leaders and dignitaries to follow in his wake, rather than squarely on the dictates of Akan tradition and customary practices. You see, I find something inherently offensive about the facile flouting of the cultural and the traditional norms of any people anywhere in the world for the appeasement and the convenience of powerful and influential foreign leaders.

And yes, it is equally true that the Japanese Prime Minister who counseled the relocation of President Nkrumah tomb from Nkroful to Accra did not forcibly pressure the Rawlings Posse to do so. Rather, he was simply successful in so counseling the Ghanaian leaders at the time because these woefully misguided and culturally diffident and psychologically alienated leaders had absolutely no proactive convictions or confidence in their own indigenous Ghanaian cultures and traditions. As well, several quite intelligent suggestions have been made to staunchly back the reasons why President Nkrumah’s mortal remains and his tomb ought not to have been relocated from Nkroful to Accra. Now, one could also reasonably argue in consonance or concurrence with the Nkroful Clan of President Nkrumah, that the very decision by the Rawlings-led Provisional National Defense Council junta to relocate the tomb of Ghana’s most celebrated leader, for the convenience of visiting foreign leaders and dignitaries, was a veritable act of the inexcusable desecration of the mortal remains and the memory of President Nkrumah in ways that far surpass the clinically stunted imagination, abject lack of self-worth and the clinically atrophied psychological temperament of moral and ideological basket cases like Mr. Samuel Atta Mills.

Ultimately, the most unspeakable level of “sacrilegious desecration” of both the mortal remains of President Mills and his memory is, unquestionably, the abject failure and glaring lack of will on the part of the Atta-Mills Family and Clan to have the mortal remains of the dynastic heir of the late Chairman Rawlings laid to rest in his ancestral home village of Ekumfi-Narkwa, in the Central Region of Ghana. This is what all well-meaning and progressive Ghanaian citizens ought to be talking about.

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

August 10, 2022

E-mail: [email protected]

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