Were Rawlings Girls Admitted to Wey-Gey-Hey on Merit?

It is an open secret that much of the qualitative pedagogical, and andragogical problems, for that matter, plaguing Ghana’s public education system is the direct and inescapable handicraft of the late Chairman Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings and his infamous bloody junta of the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC). So, I was not the least bit enthusiastic about the news report of an interview granted by the country’s longest-reigning First Lady, in which Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings was quoted to have said that if she had her way, all three of her now-adult daughters, namely, Zanetor, Yaa Asantewaa and Amina Rawlings, would have followed their parental suit or track by attending Achimota College or School and not the globally renowned Wesley Girls’ High School, located in the Central Regional Capital of Cape Coast (See “Rawlings’ Promise Prevented My Kids from Attending Achimota School – Nana Konadu” Modernghana.com 11/5/22).

I immediately sneered to myself and under my breath the following remark: “These ‘revolutionary’ nation-wreckers have Nana Sir Osagyefo Ofori-Atta, I, to thank for the privileged opportunity to attend Achimota School, much less take the latter for granted for their children to think of attending this most globally renowned, celebrated and prestigious of Ghanaian secondary schools. Of course, I still think of PERSCO – that is, the Okwawu-Nkwatia-located St. Peter’s Secondary School – that yours truly attended from 1976 to 1981, as the very best of its kind in Ghana to-date. Still, the fact of whether the Rawlings Daughters would have attended Achimota School, instead of the Cape Coast-located Wesley Girls’ High School, popularly known as “Wey-Gey-Hey,” had the then-Chairman Rawlings not made a solemn pledge to the Headmistress of the latter institutional establishment that all three of his daughters would attend Wey-Gey-Hey, is decidedly beside the point. What most matters here and that upon which the host of the “Footprints” program or talking-heads show of the Citi-TV network ought to have primarily focused upon, is the real-time or the practical contribution made by the bloody Rawlings couple towards the development or the downright and abject lack thereof to Ghana’s public education system during the 20 years that this bloody pair literally held Ghanaians by our throttle, as it were.

You see, Dear Reader, even as I write, Ghana’s Minister of Education tells the nation that only a diddly 23-percent of second graders – that is Primary-Two Pupils – are able to read at grade level. Now, what the foregoing means is that a whopping and an incredible 77-percent of the country’s second graders are fully and functionally illiterate; and all this, in the wake of the landmark and historically unprecedented implementation of the Fee-Free Senior High School System over the past four years, a socioeconomically auspicious and progressive policy initiative, authored by President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, which former President John Dramani Mahama publicly and globally disparaged as the veritable chimerical fruit of the clinically deranged imagination of a megalomaniacal politician scandalously determined to grab power by hook or crook.

Now, we also need to point out the fact that the globally infamous payola-addicted career politician the Founding-Father of whose own political party, the National Democratic Congress (NDC), perennially and incessantly described as the most thoroughgoing corrupt Ghanaian politician since Independence, was a key player of the latter predatory ideological establishment. What this further means is that as a leader who, like former US President Donald John Trump, is desperate to be democratically returned to clearly undeserved power or reins of governance, Mr. Mahama has absolutely no progressive and socioeconomically worthwhile plan or program for the salutary intellectual, technological and cultural development of Ghanaian youths, in the highly unlikely event of the Bole-Bamboi native, from the Akufo-Addo-created Savannah Region, being returned to Jubilee House in the offing.

Couple the foregoing with the wanton and apocalyptic mess that is Galamsey or illegal small-scale mining, which the former President has relentlessly and unconscionably promoted ever since he was seismically booted out of Jubilee House in 2016, and it becomes crystal clear that as a political and an ideological establishment, the National Democratic Congress is the most dangerous and ecologically destructive to have ever come into existence in postcolonial Ghana. The social significance and the political relevance of Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings to the progress and the development of Ghana has never been clear most of us avid students of Ghana’s political culture, although this veritable ideological and downright political nuisance has been held up as a beacon of enlightenment by the likes of Dr. Obed Yao Asamoah, Ghana’s longest-reigning Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, and Mr. Martin ABK Amidu, the former’s longtime ministerial second-bananas.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

November 5, 2022

E-mail: [email protected]