What Is So “Disturbing” About This Gospel Truth?

The very notion that, somehow, it is tantamount to the very height of blasphemy and/or an anathema for any bona fide Ghanaian citizen of age to dare to literally call a spade by its real name because, somehow, such Honest to God Truth may touch the raw nerves of some of the descendants, relatives and the political and the ideological disciples and adherents of the architects of the downright barbaric and the extortionate deeds and the policies of the late Chairman Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings-led juntas of the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) and the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), constitutes an unspeakable crime against the integrity, the humanity and the collective decency of the Ghanaian people, most especially those whose relatives, as well as themselves, in a remarkable number of cases, suffered the brunt of the assortment of the brutalities and the heinous atrocities of the self-righteous and state-capturing Apostles of Probity, Accountability, Transparency and Justice.

What makes the painfully cultivated tolerance and the soul-stifling silence of the critical mass of Ghanaian citizens who have suffered an intergenerational and cross-generational trauma that eerily and strikingly approximates the stygian depth of the Jewish Holocaust even more insufferably toxic and downright genocidal, is the very unspeakably asinine notion that, somehow, healthily and cathartically foregrounding the wanton atrocities perpetrated against the Ghanaian people by these self-anointed Crusaders of Probity, Accountability, Transparency and Justice, as the most efficacious means of negotiating the nightmarish traumas of the recent past, in our national sociopolitical discourse, is tantamount to “disturbing the peace and quiet” of the nation and, in particular, the patently undeserved peace and quiet of the descendants of these unconscionable butchers of the peace and quiet of the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana.

Now, isn’t it ironic for the sons and the daughters of those nation-wrecking butchers and terrorists of yesteryear to feel entitled to the proprietary arrogance of moral superiority over the descendants of the victims of the patriarchal architects of ethnic cleansing and human-life desecrating ancestors and the forebears of the Rawlingses and the Tsikatas of Ghana? (See “ ‘Sit Down, You Daughter of a Murderer’ - NPP MP Makes Disturbing Comment against Zanetor Agyeman-Rawlings” Ghanaweb.com 2/5/25).

The problem with self-righteous “Parliamentary Hijackers” and the daughters of state-capturing robber-baron politicians like Dr. Zanetor Agyeman-Rawlings, the Dublin, Irish Republic, educated pediatrician, and Dr. Kwaku Asiedu-Nketia, the Bloemfontein, South Africa, educated eldest son of the National Chairman of the National Democratic Congress, to name only a couple, is the fact that these silver spoon-fed freedloaders on the public dole have absolutely no inkling about the hard-scrabble existence of the overwhelming majority of Ghanaian citizens, in particular the 40-something-year-old eldest daughter of the late Mr. Rawlings and his widow, Mrs. Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings, Dr. Zanetor Agyeman-Rawlings, a divorced mother of several children, who has almost hermetically been cordoned off from the harsh realities of existence of many an ordinary or average Ghanaian citizen since birth, largely by National Security Operatives and lackeys and go-fer “Yes-Sir” and “Yes-Ma’am” domestics.

In short, these veritable socioeconomic and political sponges and parasites live a “Bubble-like” lavish existence of the Trumpian, and some would even say of the Mahama-ian and Akufo-Addo-ian sort, that has effectively and unhealthily prevented them from soberly coming to terms with the peevish and the downright repulsive implications of their cavalier political rhetoric or arrogance and disdain for both their political opponents and the lumpen-poor and woefully underprivileged in Ghanaian society. We shall be touching on the much-remarked albeit nauseatingly familiar arrogance of the Younger Mr. Asiedu-Nketia shortly down the pike, as it were.

For now, we need to revisit the main subject of this column, regarding the readily accessible forensically credible records, documents and evidence that attest to the imponderable magnitude of wanton atrocities and unspeakable acts of savagery and depravity perpetrated against the Ghanaian people during the two protracted decades in which the Rawlings-Tsikata Diarchy of the Anlo-Trokosi Nationalist Mafia of Sogakope effectively dominated Ghana’s political culture and the day-to-day existence of the overwhelming majority of the Ghanaian citizenry.

You see, it is her bubble-like upbringing and existence, worlds and light years apart from the grim and the nightmarish realities of the overwhelming majority of the Ghanaian people, that has pathologically warped or grossly and egregiously distorted the imagination of the National Democratic Congress-sponsored Member of Parliament for the Korle-Klottey Constituency, in Central Accra, to cavalierly presume that, somehow, her late father, to wit, the former Flt-Lt. Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings, was absolutely without any compeer or “political classmate” in postcolonial Ghana, barring none, including Ghana’s most globally renowned first postcolonial leader, President Kwame Nkrumah.

Not very long ago, for example, Dr. Zanetor Agyeman-Rawlings was widely quoted by the local Ghanaian media to have scandalously claimed that the recently outgone President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo was guilty of having thoroughly wrecked the “Economic Golden Age” created by her late father. It goes without saying that it is only a mentally and a psychologically unhinged Ghanaian citizen who would stake the claim that the socioeconomically suicidal destruction of the Kwame Nkrumah-created seminal hub that was the Ghana Industrial Holdings Corporation (GIHOC), comprised of some 140 factories and heavy industrial manufacturing plants, actually heralded an era of unprecedented economic bonanza in Ghana’s postcolonial history.

Not surprisingly, not a single key operative of the presently ruling Rawlings-fangled National Democratic Congress called the morally and the historically clueless and downright dumb daughter of the globally infamous Butcher of Sogakope to order. We also need to promptly underscore the forensically incontrovertible fact that the unspeakable wave of deadly violence that immediately followed the closure of polling in the 2024 General Election, was the direct result of the unenviable legacy of state-sponsored terrorism unleashed on Ghanaians by both the Rawlings-led governments of the erstwhile Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC), the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) and, presently, the terror-sponsoring institutional establishment of the National Democratic Congress (NDC).

Scarcely a couple of years ago, while on an electioneering-campaign stumps in the Akufo-Addo-trimmed Volta Region, the then-Candidate John “European Airbus SE Payola” Dramani Mahama proudly boasted about what the former Vice-President to the “Mysteriously Vanished” President John Evans Atta-Mills described as “The historically unmatched record of the ‘scientific’ application of violence” by the leadership and the operatives of the National Democratic Congress. Back then, as this writer vividly recalls, but for the opportune and the timely intervention of the leadership of the Ghana National Peace Council, the country could very well have been plunged into a catastrophe the likes of which had not been witnessed in at least a generation.

The preceding notwithstanding, or perhaps even more remarkably so, we are also reliably informed that the calling out of Dr. Zanetor Agyeman-Rawlings for unspeakable crimes and wanton atrocities perpetrated against the Ghanaian people, directly and logically stemmed from the fact of the Korle-Klottey NDC-MP’s rather foolhardy insistence on rising onto her feet and rudely and flagrantly speaking out of turn, when it was Parliamentary Caucuses’ Leaders and Committee Leaders or Chairpersons who had been given the greenlight to civilly and orderly take to the august floor of the House to make contributions to discussions pertaining to the 60th Anniversary Celebration and/or Observation of the Nsawam-Prison Assassination of the legendary Dr. Joseph (Kwame Kyeretwie) Boakye Danquah by President Nkrumah, at the instance of the Presiding Speaker of the Session, Mr. Andrew Asiamah.

Short of her already alluded to sense of entitlement and proprietary arrogance, what authorized Dr. Zanetor Agyeman-Rawlings, who is neither a Parliamentary Caucus’ Leader or a Committee Chairperson, at least not to the knowledge of Yours Truly, to disrespectfully jump to her feet and flagitiously attempt to buck protocol by insisting on giving vent to a subject that she very likely knew little to absolutely nothing about?

And by the way, did Chairman Rawlings himself not publicly confess, on more than one occasion, to having summarily slaughtered uniformed Ghanaian leaders and politicians of much greater integrity and moral righteousness who had not been guilty of even half of the wanton acts of official corruption and other forms of crimes committed by his protégé likes of the then and the now President Mahama and the rest the hoodlum pack of his executive associates? So, what is really so “toxically” out of kilter here, Countrymen and Countrywomen?!

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
February 5, 2025
E-mail: [email protected]