Asantehene Has Spoken Plain and Unpalatable Truth to Would-Be Nation-Wreckers

I have often said that because of the protracted decade of wanton atrocities perpetrated by the late Chairman Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings-led extortionate and barbaric junta of the erstwhile Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), retaliatory and/or punitive and disciplinary scores ought to have been allowed to be liberally and generously and justifiably and poetically settled, in classical Shakespearean parlance, such as was done in some of the Southern African Countries, and most recently in Rwanda, before the overwhelming majority of the wronged, massacred, maimed and permanently traumatised accepted the logical negotiation of a peaceful and a permanent settlement or truce, as had organically been the precolonial, traditional and the historical norm all across the African Continent and well beyond.

Anybody who really cares could avail themselves of these practical historical realities by researching the history of the formation of the various States and Nations and Kingdoms that eventually came together to constitute what is today known as the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana, as bequeathed by the British Colonial Imperialists and Nation-Builders all over the so-called Third World. It also goes without saying that those who cheaply escaped the proverbial long-arm of justice, as His Majesty, The Asantehene, Otumfuo Osei-Tutu, II, subtly adumbrated in his recent KNUST address, continue to behave smugly and cavalierly, today, almost as if the bestial perpetration of the atrocities of yesteryear were the most righteous and the perfect thing to do.

Which is why the cynical subscribers of such atavistic reprise of such ancient savagery continue to grossly misguidedly and quixotically pride themselves in some curious mythology called THE GREAT IDEAL OF JUNE 4TH and THE 31ST DECEMBER REVOLUTION of “Probity, Accountability, Transparency and Justice,” which were absolutely by no means what these foolhardy and hotheaded political buffoons would have the rest of us believe. The metaphorical jury is still out there and the Karmic Law of Retribution never permanently went out of commission or on a permanent vacation. This is precisely what a characteristically diplomatic Otumfuo Osei-Tutu, II, recently warned the Would-Be-Nation-Wreckers against during the Final Session of the 58th Congregation of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in the Asante Regional Capital of Kumasi (See “Parliamentary impasse: Ghana cannot afford luxury of prolonged fruitless litigations — Asantehene” Modernghana.com 12/2/24).

For those of us who vividly and painfully remember the “Kenkey and Fried-Fish Litigation,” led by Messrs. Kwaku Baah, John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor and Yours Truly’s own St. Peter’s Secondary School Geography Teacher Mr. B. B. Ofori, during Ghana’s Third-Republican Parliament, it was that “fruitless one-ball-of-kenkey is now ONE CEDI, and it is squarely the fault of the gross mismanagement of Ghana’s economy by the Dr. Hilla ‘Babini’ Limann-led government of the People’s National Party (PNP),” that resulted in the popular outbreak of the so-called Rawlings Revolution. This was what The Asantehene was diplomatically and almost euphemistically alluding to in the Final Session of His Majesty’s recent 58th KNUST Congregational Address.

There are not many Ghanaian citizens of this author’s generation generation who would cavalierly or even charitably claim or assert that the kind of socioeconomic inferno into which the so-called Rawlings Revolution apocalyptically plunged Ghana was any remarkably or significantly better than the admittedly harsh socioeconomic climatic reality that existed under the leadership of the Kwame Nkrumah-leaning but neoliberal market-economy oriented Limann-led and the Alhaji Imoro Egala-chaperoned People’s National Party.

Today, the core membership and the operatives of the erstwhile People’s National Party, a carryover from the remnants of the proscribed Proto-Convention People’s Party, are fairly evenly split between the leaderships of the Rump-Convention People’s Party and the Rawlings-fangled National Democratic Congress. And the results of the seamless working partnership between these splinter ideological camps, and a handful of others somewhere in-between these two camps which are, in reality, ideological Siamese Twins, all vehement protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, are there for all to see and to critically examine. What with the ironic and the inexcusably criminal deindustrialization of the country, beginning with the wholesale dismantling and the kleptocratic quartering up of the Kwame Nkrumah and the Proto-Convention People’s Party-established Ghana Industrial Holdings Corporation (GIHOC), that was created under Nkrumah’s globally celebrated “Work-and- Happiness” National Development Policy Initiative and Agenda?

Ironically, Nkrumah’s national development credo of “Work-and-Happiness” may very well have been a take-off on German Chancellor Adolf Hitler’s mantra of “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Hard-Work Is Liberating) Nazi or National Socialist Development Agenda, which sent hundreds of thousands of European Jewry into the globally infamous Gas Chambers at Auschwitz/Birkenau, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald and scores of other locations dotted across Western, Central and Eastern Europe. As well, Nkrumah’s creation of the Young Pioneers’ Movement, the Nkrumah-worshipping Youth Wing of the Convention People’s Party, has been widely perceived and recognized to be one of the institutional markers of the significance of the impact of Nazi political culture on the Proto-CPP, although it is doubtful whether Nkrumah himself really associated himself and/or his leadership style or ideological orientation with that of Der Führer.

Indeed, this author had a granduncle while growing up, the much younger brother of his maternal grandfather, who sported the Hitler-style mustache, perhaps, in retrospect, even copied from Charlie Chaplin, the globally renowned British comedian, that he found to be rather spooky and weird. At any rate, it is also rather fascinating, perhaps not exactly in the manner perceived or anticipated by the Dear Reader, that the brash and brazen and Indemnity-Clause Protected leaders of Ghana’s present main opposition political party, the National Democratic Congress, seem to be having such an extremely difficult time coming to terms with the very interpretation of a Supreme Legal Instrument of Governance whose edicts and protocols and procedural parameters they almost single-mindedly dictated, against the vehement protestations of the leadership and their counterparts of the presently ruling New Patriotic Party, who are on record to have boycotted the final proceedings of the 1992 Consultative Assembly that drafted Ghana’s Fourth-Republican Constitution.

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
December 2, 2024
E-mail: [email protected]