Does Gaslighting Martin Amidu See Crushing Defeat for NDC in Election 2024? – Part 8

Ever the typical faux-socialist ideologue, Martin Amidu rather pathetically and peevishly attempts to underestimate the intelligence of the overwhelming majority of the Ghanaian citizenry by blaming the geopolitical and the ideological West – which he, as usual, disingenuously and mischievously labels as the “International Community” – for instigating otherwise unsuspecting ordinary Ghanaian citizens against the grossly incompetent Rawlings dictatorship. Thus, rather than candidly acknowledge the fact that the Chairman Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings-led junta of the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), which overthrew the popularly and the democratically elected Dr. Hilla “Babini” Limann-led People’s National Party (PNP) had significantly performed far worse than the latter Nkrumah-leaning ideological establishment, the P/NDC’s Orwellian type of propagandist chooses to conveniently accuse the Bretton-Woods establishments of the International Monetary Fund and The World Bank – that is, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) – of having strategically and catastrophically imposed a neocolonialist Economic Recovery Program (ERP) on the ragtag government of the National Democratic Congress. Dear Reader, read the following:

“President Rawlings [having been constitutionally retired from active political engagement] then assumed the [statesman’s] role of exercising the [sic] executive power in aid of the EC to supervise the election of his successor in office and a new parliament. Within the second and last term of President Rawlings’ governance, the international community[,] inclined to promoting pluralistic multiparty [sic] democracy to support the Economic Recovery Program[,] imposed on Ghana since the 1980s[,] preferred a change in political agency to govern the country. Citizens’ actions [activist?] groups, partisan political action groups, civil society organizations funded by foreign agents [agencies?] to ensure pluralistic democracy and others advocated for change in the political party[?] to assume the reins of governance in the country.”

Actually, the real ironic twist which the 2024 UDS-sponsored Harmattan School’s Guest Lecturer choses to conveniently ignore is the fact that the PNDC junta had ridden on the patently specious crest of the pretext that the Limann government, having wisely and opportunely solicited fiscal bailout assistance from the twin Bretton-Woods establishments, something that even the much-ballyhooed Nkrumah-led government of the Convention People’s Party (CPP) had also done, during Ghana’s First Republican Dispensation was, somehow, capitally guilty of plunging the country into the ignominious status of a “Neocolonialist Republic.”

The comical irony here is that less than two years after the PNDC had ousted the Limann-led PNP, Chairman Rawlings and his “Tar-Beetles” or car-tire-made slippers-and-sandals-wearing cabinet appointees would quietly fly out of the country on the redeye or the night-owl to the US capital of Washington, DC and shamelessly negotiate an Economic Bailout Package with the Managing-Directors of the very same global lending institutions that the half-baked sophomoric PNDC intellectuals, largely struggling junior lecturers at the extant three universities in the country, namely, the University of Ghana, Legon; the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology; and the University of Cape Coast hadn been brazenly and venomously maligning as “Capitalist Piranhas,” hats and cups in hand, cadging financial assistance.

Now, what self-righteous faux-socialist ideologues like Martin Amidu mischievously either fail or conveniently refuse to inform their largely unborn present-day youthful audiences about the period under discussion, is that between June and September 1979, when the then-Flt-Lt. Rawlings-led extortionate junta of the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) toppled the transitional junta of the Gen. F W K Akuffo-led Supreme Military Council (SMC-2), the Rawlings- Tsikata Trokosi Nationalist Diarchy that briefly held the reins of governance had almost completely wrecked whatever remained of Ghana’s economy, with the grossly misguided populist policy imposition of what was then labeled as “Price Control” decrees, during which four-month period the AFRC junta arbitrarily determined the market prices of what came to be known as “Essential Commodities,” such as bath-soaps, canned fish and canned evaporated milk, rice, sugar and an assortment of industrially manufactured consumer products little of which were produced in the country.

Now, what the preceding narrative means is that by the time that the Limann-led government of the People’s National Party assumed the democratic reins of governance, Ghana was decidedly a failed state by any measure. Now, having clearly if also reluctantly caved in to the establishment of multiparty democracy in the country, the top leadership of the country’s main opposition National Democratic Congress ought to sincerely and soberly inform the overwhelming majority of Ghana’s electorate, heading into the watershed 2024 General Election, in particular the 2024 Presidential Election, that but for unrelenting pressure from the progressive forces of the then loosely organized political opposition, largely composed of the vanguard leadership of today’s ruling New Patriotic Party, for political parties had been expressly proscribed by the Rawlings-led junta of the Provisional National Defense Council, some 40-odd years ago, Ghana today could very well have become a one-party dynastic dictatorship like North Korea, the so-called Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), Togo, Uganda or any of the other politically stalemated civilian and military dictatorships in the ECOWAS Subregion.

A bitter politically ostracized and irredeemably defeated Martin Amidu, briefly but unsuccessfully rehabilitated by President Akufo-Addo, has now, almost predictably, decided to play fast and loose with the historical reality on the ground. Now, he rather gratuitously and mendaciously accuses Nana Akufo-Addo, widely known for quite a very long time for being on frigid terms with the then outgoing lame-duck President John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor, for as long as those of us who have been studiously following the fractious and factional internal political culture of the New Patriotic Party can remember, of faulting the man who had publicly refused to endorse even his own two-term Vice-Presidential Running-Mate and substantive Vice-President of the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana, of either deliberately or flatly refusing to put his considerable political heft and the coercive powers of the State behind his widely tipped immediate successor in the 2008 Presidential Election.

On the foregoing score, this is what Martin Amidu has to say: “The loser of the elections[sic], then Candidate Nana Akufo-Addo, was displeased with the inability of President Kufuor to have assisted in turning the results of the elections[sic] in his favor.” It is only a witheringly ignorant nonparty insider who would make such a statement. You see, unless he had been either clinically comatose or traveled outside the country, Martin Amidu could not have failed to hear an outgoing President Agyekum-Kufuor cheerfully “confide” to a BBC news reporter, during the 2008 Presidential Election Runoff at his Ayawaso-West-Wuogon local polling station, that he was far more studiously focused on his recent United Nations appointment, he did not specify what the latter appointment was or entailed, than the outcome of the 2008 Presidential-Election Runoff.

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
February 18, 2024
E-mail: [email protected]