More Ghanaians Left Ghana Under NDC Governments Than NPP Governments

The veritable fact and truth of history is that far many more bona fide Ghanaian citizens have left the country in droves under the socioeconomically hostile climate and the existentially toxic environment created by the leadership of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the latter institutional establishment’s parent and immediate antecedent, the late Chairman Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings-led and blood-drinking junta juggernaut that was the erstwhile Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), than have left the country under either the present Akufo-Addo-led government of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) or the erstwhile John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor-led government of the New Patriotic Party that preceded the present Akufo-Addo Administration by some eight years.

So, he is smack on target when Dr. Gideon Boako, the softspoken and urbane spokesperson for Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia and the parliamentary hopeful for Ms. Frieda Prempeh’s seat – if memory serves Yours Truly accurately – notes that it constitutes the very height of criminal political mischief and abject moral dishonesty, for any critic of the present Akufo-Addo Administration to suggest that people are leaving the country in droves the likes of which has never been witnessed since the 1870 Mass Exodus of Asante-Juabenites, for the most part, in what globally became known as The Akwantu Keseε, The Great Migration, during which traumatic period more than ONE-MILLION people went into voluntary exile from the Old Asante Federation, as a direct result of the age-old power struggles between The Osei-Tutu and The Otuo Serebuor stools, due to unspeakable economic despondency and the lack of adequate opportunities for a better living for themselves and their relatives (See “Saying Ghanaians Leave the Country Due to Dissatisfaction with NPP Gov’t Highly Dishonest – Dr. Gideon Boako” Modernghana.com 7/5/24).

And by our reference to more Ghanaians leaving the country in torrents and droves under the extortionate and the tyrannical leadership of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), we also include such late Chairman Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings-led bloody juntas as the erstwhile Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) and the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), the immediate precursor or antecedent of the Cash-and-Carry Social Darwinian National Democratic Congress. I have told my own personal story about my permanent exit from Ghana on July 26, 1985, when I came to the grim and painfully irreversible realization that I had absolutely no interest in living our collective human existence anymore, unless I exited the country and found myself somewhere, where the political and the ideological climate did not enforce the sort of barbarous “Zombie Conformity” strictly and hermetically demanded of each and every single Ghanaian citizen by the criminally fake prophets and apostles of “Probity, Accountability and Justice.”

Today, some 40 years later, I still have absolutely no appetite, let alone nostalgia, for returning “home” to resettle even temporarily, let alone permanently, in the country. On the three occasions that I have briefly returned to Ghana, it was to return the pre-requested mortal remains of my beloved parents and find them eternal resting places, as it were. On the third trip, it was to meet with my in-laws whom I had never met after 14 years of being conjugally affiliated with my wife. Presently, my wife, who loves Ghana dearly like her own heart and soul, and I are in the process of completing our second house in Ghana. But even well before we started building our first house, I had our modest three-bedroom pad, as New Yorkers are wont to say, willed into the names of our two teenage sons, namely, Daasebre Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe (Agyeman), III, The Asiakwahene; and Odeefuo Yaw Sintim-Aboagye Okoampa-Ahoofe, of Asante-Juaben and Mampong, II. And we intend to do the same with our five-bedroom, two-story house in progress, once the latter has also been completed.

You see, the Rawlings-Tsikata Reign-of-Terror Diarchy effectively weaned Yours Truly of any psychical, psychological and spiritual kinship with the land of his birth and ancestral moorings. I am also effectively rudderless, ever since I was roundly rejected by the African American Community at the State University of New York Community College where I had worked for close to three decades, as a direct consequence of making the professionally fatal mistake of contesting for and being selected as the best qualified candidate for Chairperson of the African American Studies Department a little over a year ago. I mean, there are a legion number and degrees of traumas to talk about surmounting here. In the end, though, the archetypal and the metaphorical trope of us humans being inescapably and inevitably transient wayfarers right here on Planet Earth could not be even truer than what the Ancient Hebraic Prophets tell us.

Now, I really can’t fathom how these godforsaken NDC critics of the present lame-duck Akufo-Addo government live with themselves, making such patently groundless accusations as the Akyem Mafia – and oh, yes, there exists an Akyem Mafia alright – and the Akyem-Abomosu Boys having made the country irreparably unlivable, when it was unarguably these very same shameless critics and warmongers who effectively bankrupted the John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor-implemented and historically unprecedented low-premium National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), and callously and unconscionably refused to either create or facilitate the historic and the progressive implementation of the Akufo-Addo-implemented Fee-Free Senior High, Vocational, Technical and STEM Education System, the abjectly criminal failure of which had annually resulted in approximately a Quarter-Million (250,000) talented and able-bodied youths from lumpen-poor families being literally chucked out onto the streets and alleyway of our cities, towns and villages across the length and the breadth of the country, only to succumb to such desperate and morally unsavory vices as prostitution, armed robbery and murder and as specially recruited goon squads of made-for-hire assassins.

Under the present Akufo-Addo government and the Vice-President Bawumia-spearheaded issuance of the biometric or digitized National Identification Cards (NIC) by the Kenneth Agyemang Attafuah-headed National Identification Authority (NIA), which can also be readily used as a passport to travel to a couple of a dozen countries around the globe, Ghanaians have been rendered more mobile than they have ever been throughout almost 70 years of our postcolonial existence. So, what are these National Democratic Congress’ charlatans talking about? In 1984, for example, when my late mother, then domiciled right here in the United States of America, came to Ghana to take my younger sister and me along with her to New York City, when the travel visas were ready to be issued us at the United States of America Consulate across the street from the Accra Headquarters of the Ghana Police Service, Dear Reader, you guessed right, our passports had still not been processed by the Foreign Affairs Secretariat of the Rawlings-led junta of the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC)! It would take close to a whole year before our passports would be processed and ready for pickup.

You see, if more people are leaving the country in droves than it used to be the case even in the most recent past, this is squarely because the ragtag and grossly incompetent regimes of the erstwhile Provisional National Defense Council and its immediate successor, the so-called National Democratic Congress, had deliberately made it extremely difficult for Ghanaians fed up and tired with the totally bankrupt faux-socialist policies of the Rawlings-Tsikata Diarchy to leave the country. Maybe these scrawny and extremely hungry cardboard revolutionaries were waiting for the next postcolonial slave ship from the United States to dock at Tema or Takoradi or both seaports and anywhere in-between, so that they could be the very first would-be-slaves to jump onboard and leave the very country they had so wantonly and thoroughly fleeced and economically wrecked behind.

*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 8, 2024
E-mail: [email protected]