Scarecrow Murtala Needs Facial Uplift

Human Facial ID Card-carrying political opportunists like the rump-Convention People’s Party (rump-CPP) crossover National Democratic Congress-sponsored Member of Parliament, Mr. Murtala Mohammed, would do himself and the rest of his countrymen and countrywomen a heck of a lot of good to get a facial, plastic surgery one of these days and stop sexually heckling and harassing progressive fellow politicians like New Patriotic Party-sponsored august House member Mrs. Ursula Owusu-Ekuful, who also doubles as the Minister of Communications and Digitization, on the purely private albeit hot-button issue of LGTQ+ culture or subculture (See “ ‘You Are Mad! Have You Seen Me Having Sex with Your Mother or Wife?’ -Ursula Owusu Descends on Murtala Mohammed” Modernghana.com 7/6/23).

On the latter note, I solemnly wish to take this otherwise inopportune or unseasonable opportunity to pay tribute to the recently deceased Mr. Akoto Ampaw, for staunchly unreservedly defending the human and the civil rights of LGBTQ+ victims of morally benighted bully politicians, largely from the self-righteous institutional establishment of the country’s main opposition National Democratic Congress. Mr. Akoto Ampaw’s epochal transitioning into the ages, as former US President Barack H. Obama once said of South Africa’s legendary and immortalized first indigenous African President, Mr. Nelson R Mandela, at the latter’s globally celebrated funeral in Johannesburg and several South African cities. Firebrand legal light and wit Akoto-Ampaw’s passing leaves a gaping and an abysmal chasm on the battlefront of Ghana’s human rights protection of the socially maligned, vulnerable and the abjectly poor and the overwhelming majority of the country’s roughly estimated 38 million-plus citizens that will not be easy to fill.

Anyway, he is a political opportunist and an economic parasite because Mr. Murtala Mohammed started out as pumped-up executive operative of the rump-Convention People’s Party, as I vividly recall, and got mercilessly trounced in his first attempt to gun for our National Assembly. His extremely unprepossessing facial tribal scarification must have scared off a lot of young voters farther north of Tamale, where he had originally contested in a parliamentary election. But for the wise and strategically savvy decision by Mr. Inusah Fuseini, then the impregnable MP for Tamale-Central Constituency not to contest for a retention of his long-held seat, in the wake of the apocalyptic fallout from the John “European Airbus Payola” Dramani Mahama-engineered double-salary scandal, Mr. Murtala Mohammed would very likely have become a street-strolling mendicant in Nanton or some such godforsaken outback northern township.

The fact of the matter is that Ghanaian voters do not send their elected representatives to Parliament to debate and get comfortably paid to decide the fact of whether LGBTQ+ people and their culture or subculture is to blame for gross managerial incompetence of our leaders from both major political parties, namely, the presently ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the country’s main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC). The fact of the matter, even as pointedly underscored by the recently deceased lambent-witted legal luminary, Mr. Akoto Ampaw, himself a bona fide stalwart of the rump-Convention People’s Party, the sexual orientation and/or practices of mutually consenting adults is an inalienable human and civil right that is not subject to the constitutionally untenable oversight of scarecrow parliamentary representative likes of the former Mahama-gifted Deputy Minister and pathologically pontifical Mr. Samuel Nettey George.

Perhaps we can promptly begin a dispassionate discussion about which of our last two Fourth-Republican Presidents was or has been more culpable or guilty of running a family and friends’ government of the most grossly incompetent tenor or caliber. Does this writer really need to underscore the fact that there are far too many pressing problems in the land, as it were, not the least bit of which is the deleterious effects of Galamsey or small-scale illegal mining, for any elected Ghanaian leader to be wastefully tussling over and unwisely frivoling with the question of which mutually consenting adults go to bed nightly or daily with whom, as well as the purely private question of who prefers homosexual or heterosexual intercourse or who does not. In short, it is only politicians who have absolutely no substantive agenda for the critical development of the country, in particular the significant socioeconomic uplift of the lumpen-poor and destitute among our citizenry, who talk recklessly and thoughtlessly like Mr. Murtala Mohammed.

And, by the way, if he were really a forward-looking student or scholar of the Founding-Father of the proto-Convention People’s Party (that is, CPP Proper), the Ursula Owusu verbal sniper would also have since long learned that the culturally barbaric act of “cicatrizing” or facial scarification, among some unenlightened tribal bands in the country, had been expressly proscribed as far back as the 1950s, when Mr. Murtala Mohammed was not even yet born, by the legendary and immortalized proverbial “African Show Boy.” Now, what the foregoing statement and observation means is that hallucinogen-induced haughty and clinically daft and self-absorbed politicians like Mr. Murtala Mohammed, as well as his immediate predecessor and former occupant of the Tamale-Central Parliamentary Seat, would be vigorously campaigning against the patently criminal and heinous uglification of Ghanaian children and our youths this scandalously late in the Twenty-First Century.

It also begins to make sense why kleptocratic political scam-artists like Mr. Murtala Mohammed would rabidly rail against the civilized introduction of the Ghana Card, a far more intelligent and civically progressive mode of citizenship identification and the most effective code of conduct in a civilized postcolonial society like the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana. Straw-hut dwelling ethnic minority citizens like Mr. Murtala Mohammed must learn to be tolerant of their LGBTQ+ fellow citizens and neighbors, in much the same manner that those of us among the Akan ethnic majority population have been widely known to be remarkably urbane or polite and tolerant of insufferably arrogant ethnic minority citizens like Mr. Murtala Mohammed.

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
July 6, 2023
E-mail: [email protected]