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06.06.2023 Feature Article

You Only “Eulogize” the Dead, Dear Ghanaweb!

You Only Eulogize the Dead, Dear Ghanaweb!
06.06.2023 LISTEN

I have tended to have the same opinion in the past, when Nigerians rapturously praised the thoroughgoing corrupt and inexcusably extortionate leadership of Ghana’s first postcolonial President, Mr. Kwame Nkrumah, almost as if the latter had been the best thing that happened to Ghanaians and our beloved nation since the “Sheroic” rise of the legendary and immortalized Queenmother Yaa Asantewaa of Edweso (Ejisu) and, some say, Adansi-Akrokyere (Akrokerri) and/or Kokobiante, in modern-day Asante Region, took up arms to fiercely fight off European colonial imperialism.

Many Nigerians that I have chanced to communicate and interact with have also expressed the same peevish sentiment to me about how the late Chairman Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings, the most unarguably brutal and murderous – some say “Revolutionary” – of all our postcolonial Ghanaian rulers. And when that has happened, I have not hesitated for a nanosecond to let these scandalously naïve and grossly misguided Nigerian nationals know my utter regret that they had not invited the globally infamous Butcher-of-Sogakope over to their country to take legal residency of Abuja’s Aso Rock Palace when it mattered the most, that is, at the height of the anti-Akan pogroms criminally and ruthlessly orchestrated by the Rawlings-Tsikata-led junta of the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC).

Which is also why I find the initial gut reaction of those Nigerians who, reportedly, caustically lambasted Ghana’s President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo’s sendoff speech “eulogizing” Nigeria’s recently departed – actually constitutionally retired – President, Alhaji Muhammadu Buhari to be nothing short of the decidedly familiar and even nauseatingly pedestrian (See “Nigerians Descend on Akufo-Addo after Buhari Comments” Ghanaweb.com 5/20/23). Now, as indicated in the caption of this column, in standard correct English, one does not “eulogize” the living, however old and deathly frail they may look or appear to the onlooker. You only “eulogize” the dead upon their death, such as in the wake of the epochal passing of the fine and generously talented Ghanaian woman playwright, poet, novelist, educator and politician, Ms. Ama Ata Aidoo, at 81 years old.

Actually, not quite long ago, the former Visiting Professor of African and Women’s Literature at the prestigious Brown University, on Rhode Island, right here in the United States of America, corrected what she claimed to be her routinely and deliberately miscalculated official date of birth as one that actually occurred on March 31,1940 and not 1942, as the Abeadzi-Kyiakor-born Akan and Fante native from Ghana’s Central Region had maintained on her curriculum vitae or professional profile for most of her adult life. Which, in effect, means that at her death on May 31, 2023, the renowned literary artist was actually 83 years old and not 81 years old, as almost all the newspaper and media portal obituaries had it. To be certain, it was Prof. Ama Ata Aidoo (Adu) who inspired this writer to start giving his actual date of birth quite recently. I send my sincere and heartfelt condolences to the deceased author’s only adult child and daughter, Ms. Kinna Likimani, of a Zimbabwean father, whom I once met at New York City’s Schomburg Library for Research in Black and African Culture during a Cornell University-sponsored celebration of the equally rich and fruitful life of Prof. Efua T. Sutherland, widely recognized with the accolade of Mother of Modern African Theater.

What is clear here is the fact that when it comes to the profiles of our respective leaders and leaderships, Ghanaians and Nigerians have invariably tended to be at cross-purposes, with Nigerians disconsolately lamenting the fact that, by and large, they seem to have been accursed with very corrupt and morally and pathologically reprobate leadership. In his immediate Post-Nobel Award anthology of political essays, for example, Nigeria’s Prof. Wole Soyinka “jarringly” lamented the fact that his country had not been blessed with a “righteous” military strongman of the caliber of Ghana’s Chairman Rawlings. That slim but hard-driving collection of essays was titled “The Open Sore of a Continent.” In a review of the latter memoir that this writer wrote and published in the New York Amsterdam News, where he was the Book Review Editor and Reporter – free-lance – for quite a number of years, he vividly recalls impugning the wholesomeness of Prof. Soyinka’s apparent exultation at the needless and inexcusably bloody Rawlings Revolution as one that would have been more suitable for Nigeria, if only to serve as a signal deterrent to the riotously rampant eruption of military coups in Africa’s most populous and biggest economy.

As of this writing, however, it is not clear to yours truly where the approximately 90-year-old Prof. Soyinka presently stands on this same subject today. Chances are that Continental Africa’s Foremost Playwright may very well have significantly revised and moderated his patently angry and grossly ill-considered stance of yesteryear, especially in the wake of his recent shock and apparent consternation that the late Chairman Rawlings was, after all, just another run-of-the-mill kleptocratic uniformed postcolonial African junta thug like the rest of all this hoodlum pack. This most salutary wakeup call would come in the wake of Prof. Soyinka’s serendipitous discovery that Gen. Sani Abacha, the late globally infamous Nigerian dictator had actually bribed the then suavely civilianized Ghanaian despot the quite considerable amount of $ 5 million (USD) in liquid cash, to do a public relations con job for the Kano-born Hausa Tribal Chieftain at a time when most Nigerian citizens were having an extremely difficult time making ends meet, as it were.

Ultimately, Ghana’s President Akufo-Addo had absolutely no choice but to rapturously “eulogize” his recently outgone Nigerian counterpart, being that he had been specially and specifically invited for a book-launching ceremony – actually, a two-book launching ceremony – and a presidential sendoff party, I presume, whose raison d’etre was to have the host generously festooned with encomiums of the most superlative order. To the high heavens, as it were. I mean, doesn’t common sense alone tell those Nigerian critics and so-called Netizens and Tweeps that one simply does not courteously accept the role of a guest-of-honor at a good neighbor’s soiree or festivity, only to rain torrents of unprovoked abuse and gratuitous insults at the host?

Plus, after all, hadn’t the Ghanaian leader been shrewd and rather objective enough to remind attendees at President Buhari’s twin-book launch that the democratically elected former Nigerian strongman had, like the rest of each and every one of us, humans, had his very low and very high moments on this humongous and most complex petrochemical job? I mean, what else do these snooty-bastard scumbag critics of Nana Akufo-Addo really expect? To see “The Little Man from Kyebi” put a head pad on his relatively jumbo noggins and earnestly demand to carry their alimentary waste or nigh soil? Come on, now, Omo Nigeria, give us a break!

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
June 3, 2023
E-mail: [email protected]

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