There Was an “Asante Project” before there Was an “Akyem Project” – Part 8

You see, in order for any levelheaded patriotic Ghanaian citizen to fully appreciate the radical and the salutary revolutionary, systematic and structural changes being effected by the present Akufo-Addo-led government of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), that civically responsible and progressive-minded adult-Ghanaian citizen may, perforce, need to revisit the bloody pages of postcolonial Ghanaian history, especially those pages detailing the “revolutionary” emergence and the politically regressive and apocalyptic activities of the late Chairman Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings-led junta juggernaut that was the short-lived Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC), the most extortionate and sanguinary unleashing of organized military barbarism of its kind in the nearly seven decades of postcolonial Ghanaian history and, definitely, one of the most savage and bloodiest chapters of its kind in Twentieth Century Continental African History.

Ironically, there was, indeed, even a time that such Continental African Literary Giants and Wits like Prof. Wole Soyinka, the 1986 Nigerian Nobel Literature Prize Laureate, were convinced that the so-called Rawlings Revolution was precisely what the proverbial doctor ordered as a definitive antidote for the total eradication of rank and wanton corruption in Continental Africa and most of the rest of the so-called Third World Countries at large. The putative “African Shakespeare” poignantly observed the preceding in one of his immediate Post-Nobel Memoirs, titled “The Open Sore of a Continent: A Personal Narrative of the Nigerian Crisis” (1996), which this writer, at the time the Book Review Editor of the nationally celebrated African American weekly newspaper and one of the oldest continuously published African American newspaper in the United States, namely, The New York Amsterdam News (Est. 1909), personally reviewed and caustically lambasted in the late 1990s.

Now, some 20-odd years later and with Chairman Rawlings’ $5 million (USD) scamming of Nigerian citizens and taxpayers, a la the late Gen. Sani Abacha-extorted moola sharply and bitterly etched in his encyclopedic mnemonic bank, I am quite certain that Prof. Soyinka has radically revised such a scandalously exuberant take on the Rawlings Revolution that he fervidly harbored a little over a generation ago. It would eventually and ultimately come to light that the Rawlings Revolution was decidedly about anything and absolutely about everything, except that which the overwhelming majority of the Ghanaian citizenry had been hoodwinked into believing was the progressive and the radical shakeup and/or resetting of the widely perceived rankly corrupt order of affairs in the extant democratically fashioned Third-Republican Ghana.

It is rather morally tragic that even this late in the farcical Orwellian game that was the Rawlings Revolution, literary giants and preeminent wits like Prof. Soyinka and even the globally celebrated and immortalized Prof. Chinua Achebe, of “Things Fall Apart” (1958) fame, would curiously envisage Chairman Rawlings as the epitome or the paragon of progressive postcolonial African political culture. In reality as well as in practical terms, the Rawlings Revolution was inescapably an Anlo-Ewe Nationalist and Fascist attempt to completely obliterate the cultural and institutional presence of the Akan majority populace of Ghana, both politically and economically. In particular, the Rawlings Revolution which ushered in the faux-socialist junta of the erstwhile Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), the immediate precursor and/or progenitor of the present-day faux-civilianized National Democratic Congress (NDC), had the main and sole objective of internally and effectively colonizing Ghana’s Akan ethnic majority and the single most significant engine of the socioeconomic, cultural and the political architecture and, to be certain, Ghanaian Civilization in ways not even envisaged by the super-powerful erstwhile British colonialists.

Which was essentially and precisely why nearly all the most significant cabinet portfolios of the Provisional National Defense Council, including that of the Presidency/Head-of-State, Secretaries of Finance, Defense, National Security and Intelligence and the Judiciary, among several others, were almost hermetically cannibalized and controlled by Ewe-descended Ghanaians and a few trusted grossly misguided and self-alienated Akans and Non-Ewe loyalists, in strikingly the same manner described in the unarguably National Democratic Congress-concocted “Agyapadeε” Document.

In the latter document, the Telecommunications Sector is one of the highlighted key sectors of the country’s economy to be fiercely contested by the leaderships of the country’s two major political parties, namely the presently ruling New Patriotic Party and the main opposition National Democratic Congress. Which ought to come as absolutely nothing new or strategically underhanded to any keen observer of our national political landscape over the past half century, as Telecommunications Technology has become the single most important tool used by the leaderships of both the faux-socialist institutional establishments of the erstwhile Provisional National Defense Council and the present-day National Democratic Congress to wage a relentless war on both the country’s enterprising Akan ethnic majority, in particular ethnic Asantes, a sizeable majority of Akans of Fante subethnic descent having already been cannibalized, “Asante-Bypass Fashion,” by the Anlo-Ewe Project Managers of the Dzelukope-Sogakope Mafia.

Which is why in the Hopeson Adorye-published “Agyapadeε” Document, the perennially strategic monopolization of the Telecommunications Industry receives a quite prominent, even if a brief spatial, play with a deliberately calculated sarcastic reference made of the current Minister of Communications, Mrs. Ursula Owusu-Ekuful, in a way that is obviously intended to emphasize the supposedly “nepotistic” tenure of an old and jaded political strategy that was actually invented by the Anlo-Ewe cabal among the vanguard ranks of the National Democratic Congress and, prior to the latter institutional juggernaut, the Rawlings-Tsikata-chaperoned junta of the Provisional National Defense Council.

It is a means of “tactical distraction” and strategic detour or feint deftly calculated by the Anlo-Ewe operatives of the P/NDC in the form of the corralling and the coopting of the Totobi Quakyis and the Ahwoi Brothers. You see, what the chameleonic Anlo-Ewe goons and Kyerematen-cum-NDC-allied propagandists would not publicly acknowledge is the fact that short of thoroughly rearranging the metaphorical deck of playing cards in the Telecommunications Industry, there is absolutely no way for the movers-and-the-shakers of the relatively more progressive social-intervention oriented New Patriotic Party to have any fighting chance in an NDC-rigged Fourth Republican political culture.

We painfully witnessed a bit of this strategic contretemps pathetically play out in the recent abortive attempt by Mr. Bryan Acheampong to assume majority shares in a half-dozen poorly performing state-owned and SSNIT-managed hotels, when the New Patriotic Party’s Member of Parliament for Okwawu-Abetifi, in the Akufo-Addo electoral stronghold of the Eastern Region, who presently doubles as Ghana’s Minister of Food and Agriculture, rather naively supposed that he could, somehow, cogently reason with Mr. Samuel Okudzeto-Ablakwa, the diehard Teacher-Trainee Allowance Extorting Trokosi Nationalist Sharpshooter and Mahama bootlicker, about mutually beneficial state-private entrepreneurial collaboration, woefully forgetting that National Democratic Congress human automatons like the North-Tongu Member of Parliament have been primitively programmed to think and behave like old- school ideationally bereft communist apparatchiks.

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