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Kantamanto Fire-Razing Is Healthy For Disease-Wearing Poor Ghanaians

Feature Article Kantamanto Fire-Razing Is Healthy For Disease-Wearing Poor Ghanaians
SUN, 12 JAN 2025

The 2024 General Elections are over and done with, with the lead operatives of the then main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) having played the game craftily albeit crudely to their best advantage, with the daftly complacent and morbidly self-absorbed leadership of a failure-tempting New Patriotic Party (NPP) jigging drunkenly to their own masturbatory Echo-Chamber Music that it really does not seem to matter any longer, precisely who played it kosher or in a Devil-May-Care manner.

Still, I find it a bit interesting, at least for the sake of the record books, to discuss a brief news story that was published in the GhanaWeb edition of Wednesday, September 25, 2024, titled “Court Orders EC to Revert 1,000 Fraudulent Voter Transfers at Manhyia South” (Ghanaweb.com 9/25/24). In the afore-referenced story, a Kumasi Magistrate by the name of Judge Deborah Gyaawa (Gyanwaa?) Donkor was reported to have ordered the return and the reversion of some 1,000-plus electoral registrants who had been criminally and illegally transferred from several constituencies, presumably, in the Kumasi Metropolis and strategically packed onto the Manhyia-South Constituency Voters’ Register, in order to ensure an undeserved electoral victory for the National Democratic Congress in this hermetic and “safe” electoral stronghold of the New Patriotic Party.

Unless some criminal penalties had been exacted by the presiding magistrate, that is, Judge Deborah Gyaawa Donkor, it is highly likely that this treasonous game of deliberate disenfranchisement will be repeated down the line or the pike in the near future. But what we want to even more importantly highlight here is the recent complete torching of the Kantamanto Market in Accra, Ghana’s capital, that made the global news headlines and was ingloriously described as the World’s Largest Second-Hand Clothing Market. Now, I describe such unsavory accolade as “inglorious” if also because it shamefully underlines the heinous and the criminal depravity of the leadership of the late Chairman Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings-led junta of the erstwhile Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), the immediate and the direct antecedent and progenitor of the Rawlings-founded National Democratic Congress that precipitated the IMF-World Bank midwifed genocidal DEINDUSTRIALIZATION of Ghana, in particular the thorough and the wholesale dismantling of the Kwame Nkrumah-founded Ghana Industrial Holdings Corporation (GIHOC), comprised of some 140 factories and heavy industrial manufacturing plants.

But that the Kantamanto Market, until its historically auspicious and hygienically bracing suspicious conflagration and thorough razing into cinders and ashes was “inglorious,” is herein reckoned on the basis of the unarguable scientific fact that the massive importation of second-hand or used clothing into the country also implied the politically unwise and neocolonialist policy of the massive importation of foreign diseases into the country, a remarkable number of which diseases may very well have been incurable.

Now, couple the preceding with the generally poor quality of healthcare delivery in the country, and it eerily becomes crystal clear that Ghanaians were sitting on a ticking time bomb the ultimate consequences of which were indisputably bound to be immeasurable in the offing. Which, in effect, clearly means that the complete and the total razing of the Kantamanto Market was the beneficent act of an “Inscrutable Divine Providence” that was meant to protect Ghanaians from an imminent catastrophe of apocalyptic proportions the likes of which has never been witnessed in recent memory.

It could be inescapably and unarguably likened to the kind of the criminal exportation of radioactive waste materials from some Global Nuclear Superpower Countries that were being reportedly exported to some Third-World Countries, including some African Countries, in the late 1980s and through much of the 1990s, in exchange for what literally amounted to adding a proverbial insult to injury, in the characteristic form of piddling and miserly financial aid packages.

But that the complete burning down of the Kantamanto Market in Accra occurred under the watch of the John “Ahmed Bola Tinubu” Dramani Mahama-led government of the National Democratic Congress, a faux-populist political and ideological establishment whose kleptocratic leadership claims to be inveterate enemies and detractors of capitalist property ownership, could not have come at a more perfect time. Which, in effect, means that if there are, indeed, any arsonists behind this widely alleged suspicious act of heinous criminality of the highest order, it is far more likely for the authors and/or architects and orchestrators of such dastardly and economically genocidal act to be either hirelings or operatives of the National Democratic Congress, whose leader and the current President of Ghana, Mr. John “European Airbus SE Payola” Dramani Mahama, has publicly and categorically boasted about his party being composed of an unmatched caliber of the most vicious and violent Ghanaian citizens in the postcolonial era.

The complete and the total burning down of Kantamanto Market also offers a prime opportunity for the newly installed Mahama Government to promptly and expeditiously implement Kwame Gonja’s much-ballyhooed 24-Hour Economy, Industrial and Job-Creation Policy Agenda. Goodluck, Sir Jonathan’s Ghanaian Twin Brother. Trust me, you will need it!

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
January 12, 2025
E-mail: [email protected]

Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD, © 2025

Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD, taught Print Journalism at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City, for more than 20 years. He is also a former Book Review Editor of The New York Amsterdam News.. More He holds Bachelor of Arts (Summa Cum Laude) in English, Communications and Africana Studies from The City College of New York of The City University of New York, where he was named a Ford Foundation Undergraduate Fellow and the first recipient of the John J. Reyne Artistic Achievement Award in English Poetry (Creative Writing) in 1988.

The author was part of the "socially revolutionary" team of undergraduate journalists at City College of New York (CCNY) of the City University of New York (CUNY), who won First-Prize certificates for Best Community Reporting from the Columbia University School of Journalism, for three consecutive years, from 1988 to 1990.

Born April 8, 1963, in Ghana; naturalized U.S. citizen; son of Kwame (an educator) and Dorothy (maiden name, Sintim) Okoampa-Ahoofe; children: Abena Aninwaa, Kwame III. Ethnicity: "African." Education: City College of the City University of New York, B.A. (summa cum laude), 1990; Temple University, M.A., 1993, Ph.D., 1998. Politics: Independent. Religion: "Christian—Ecumenist." Hobbies and other interests: Political philosophy.

CAREER: Ghana National Cultural Center, Kumasi, poet, 1979–84; Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, worked as instructor in English; Technical Career Institutes, New York, NY, instructor in English, 1991–94; Indiana State University, Terre Haute, instructor in history, 1994–95; Nassau Community College, Garden City, NY, member of English faculty. Participant in World Bank African "Brain-Gain" pilot project.

MEMBER: Modern Language Association of America, National Council of Teachers of English, African Studies Association, Community College Humanities Association.

AWARDS, HONORS: Essay award, Nassau Review, 1999.
Column: Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

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