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Is General Mosquito a Rawlings Avatar? – Part 3

Feature Article Is General Mosquito a Rawlings Avatar? – Part 3
MAR 31, 2023 LISTEN

I was in absolutely no small way or by no mean measure unamused by the following caption that headlined a news story in which the National Democratic Congress’ Member of Parliament for Kumasi-Asawase, in the Asante Region, was widely reported by the local Ghanaian media to have called a press conference, during which the Johnson Asiedu-Nketia-ousted Parliamentary Chief Whip of the Minority Caucus erupted with fury over the abrupt and unilateral manner in which the Haruna Iddrisu Gang was removed in one fell stroke of the mathematically precise pen of the man who is more popularly known and readily identifiable as The Mosquito, General Mosquito or, simply, as The Pesky Mosquito. The caption of the aforementioned news story was as follows: “If We Win Power, Is this How Decisions Will Be Taken? – Muntaka Questions NDC Leadership Over Reshuffle” Modernghana.com 1/26/23).

I could not help but heavily and swiftly fall off this very chair on which I had been sitting at my oak-crafted desk at the time. I was wracked with “obstreperous guffaw” or raucous laughter, as Nigeria’s erudite and classicist Nobel Literature Laureate dramatist, author, essayist and thinker Prof. Wole Soyinka would have more eloquently and magnificently put it. Or perhaps magniloquently put it. I guess the Dear Reader could even more aptly and legitimately say that this writer has been struck as lightening by “amusement paralysis,” if, indeed, there existed any such expression in the English language.

Maybe King Charles or Prince Harry, my favorite butt-kicking royal “Spare-Tire,” absolutely no apologies to Ghana’s twice-trounced one-term President Dumsor, as such an apology could very well see this anathema and downright abomination of a megalomaniacal politician returned to Jubilee House. And then, of course, our Fourth-Republican era of “Neo-Slavery” could definitely be “Afrocentrically” and “Afropeanistically” returned once more. I have even read somewhere that President Dumsor, or Okogufuo Yagbonwura Kwame Gonja, has been feverishly scheming to be returned to Jubilee House with a vengeance, so that he could tinker with Ghana’s already hopelessly hobbled 1992 Republican Constitution and slavocratically lord it over Ghanaian voters and the citizenry once more.

This time around, Kwame Gonja has even promised that he would have Otumfuo Osei-Tutu, II, the “Uber Mensch” that the Bole-Bamboi native, from the Akufo-Addo-created Savannah Region, prefers to call “The Lying King,” instead of “The Lion King,” re-exiled back to the Seychelles, as the Sovereign Democratic Republic of the Erstwhile Gold Coast cannot afford to have Two Constitutional Monarchs at the same time. Actually, what I was really thinking about as the most appropriate and logical rejoinder to the seismic conniption of Alhaji Mohammed Mubarak Muntaka against the early morning military putsch that ousted the Haruna Iddrisu Gang, is this memorable Jewish-Holocaust era quotation globally attributed to a German Christocentric clergyman by the name of Pastor or Reverend Martin Niemӧller. It is tersely titled “First They Came” and reads poetically as follows: “First they came for the Communists/ And I did not speak out/ Because I was not a Communist/ Then they came for the Socialists/ And I did not speak out/ Because I was not a Socialist/ Then they came for the Trade Unionists/ And I did not speak out/ Because I was not a Trade Unionist/ Then they came for the Jews/ And I did not speak out/ Because I was not a Jew/ Then they came for me/ And there was no one left/ To speak for me.”

From the website where the preceding quote was culled, this is the Editor’s Note on Pastor Martin Niemӧller, the author. It also reads tersely as follows: “Martin Niemӧller is best known for writing ‘First They Came,’ but he is a complicated figure. Initially an antisemitic Nazi supporter, his views changed when he was imprisoned in a Concentration Camp for speaking out against Nazi control of Churches.” Now, what does the foregoing tell us about the inextricable interlinkage between the fate and the destiny of Global Humanity? It is, of course, simply the stark and incontrovertible fact that by and large, we, each and every one of us, have far more in common than we are almost invariably inclined to recognize and believe. That is perfectly human nature. We tend to be so pathologically selfish and myopic that we only recognize and moralize that which specifically affects our interests and well-being.

Now, didn’t the politically and pontifically self-righteous likes of Messrs. Haruna Iddrisu, Mohammed Mubarak Muntaka and James Klutse Avedzi witness the brutal savaging of Mr. George Boateng in the runup to the 2016 Presidential Election, when the then 45-year-old former Oyarefa, Greater-Accra Region, District Organizer of the National Democratic Congress, a longshot and a comically marginal party-machine operative, decided to challenge the then-incumbent President Mahama for the Presidential Nomination of the National Democratic Congress by the then Dynastic General-Secretary of the latter party? How about the equally scandalous seizure of the Klottey-Korle Parliamentary Seat from Mr. Ashitey, if memory serves this writer accurately, and the criminally undemocratic gifting of the same to Dr. Zanetor Agyeman-Rawlings, the Dublin, Irish Republic-trained pediatrician and eldest daughter of the late Founding-father of the National Democratic Congress?

Now, did any of the aforementioned front-bench members of the National Democratic Congress raise their voices or even utter a single word in protest? Of course, the correct answer is “Absolutely Not!” You see, Dear Reader, Americans have a common but very wise saying that, ultimately, “Whatever goes around also comes around,” much, much sooner than anybody can imagine.

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
March 23, 2023
E-mail: [email protected]

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