African Unity Must Be Based on a Mutuality of Reciprocal Leadership Responsibility and Efficient Governance - Part 2

Now, contrary to what Ghana’s President John “2014 Brazil World Cup Money Laundering” Dramani Mahama, would have the global community believe, in the wake of the massive and the wanton assault of Ghanaian migrants in South Africa, the Government of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), that is, Ghana’s ruling political party, has had to engage the fiscally prohibitive services of some three charter flights, presumably not three different airliners or individual airplanes, to ship out criminally besieged Ghanaian nationals out of Johannesburg and several other metropolitan cities and centers all across South Africa back to their native country, a distance of approximately 5,000 miles/8,000 kilometers, or some six hours of a nonstop flight on a commercial airliner.

I kept scratching my head and wondering whether the Ghanaian leader had also calculated the number of flight hours and mileage that it took some 140,000 Nigerian immigrants and migrants and long-term residents expelled from Ghana in 1970 by the Progress Party Government of Prime Minister Kofi Abrefa Busia, under the decree or the edict of the globally infamous Aliens Compliance Order. And, of course, as was to be naturally and logically expected, the foregoing “favor,” as Americans hereabouts are wont to say, was duly and resoundingly returned in 1983, when an estimated excess of ONE-MILLION Ghanaian nationals were summarily expelled from Nigeria by the Government of the Alhaji Shehu Shagari-led National Party of Nigeria (NPN).

Like the Prime Minister Busia-issued Aliens’ Compliance Order of 1969 and 1970, the “Ghana Must Go!” decree of 1983, came in the wake of the acute economic crisis that followed the junta overthrow of President Hilla “Babini” Limann’s People National Party (PNP) Government by the Flt-Lt. Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings-led Government of the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC). Chairman Rawlings would at the time bitterly complain to any of his counterparts in the West African Subregion or ECOWAS who cared to listen, that the decision by President Shagari to expel the Ghanaian nationals, approximately a moiety or one-half of the Two-Million foreign nationals deported from West Africa/s oil-rich and most populous country and largest economy, had been strategically and deliberately aimed at toppling his PNDC junta regime, apparently more so because like the Northern-Descended democratically elected Mr. Shagari, Ghana’s Dr. Limann, of Northern-Ghanaian Descent, had equally been democratically elected by the popular vote or franchise in Nigeria’s putatively closest sister country in the West African Subregion.

In the case of Nigeria, the 1969-70 massive expulsion by Ghana of the former country’s nationals was relatively far more dire and damning because Dr. Busia’s Aliens’ Compliance Order came in the immediate wake or right on the heels of the globally infamous Nigerian Civil War or the Biafran War of Abortive Independence that had claimed the lives of some FIVE-MILLION PEOPLE, an overwhelming majority of whom were of Ibo/Igbo ethnicity and cultural identity.

Now, what the foregoing gloomy observation means is that the Nigerian nationals targeted for expulsion were being callously shipped out from the proverbial skillet or frying pan into flames of the immediate Post-War Nigeria. The catastrophic impact of the Aliens’ Compliance Order of Prime Minister Busia’s Government was also strikingly akin to the apocalyptic predicament of the immediate Post-Nazi Holocaust, well before the Biafran Catastrophe, in which an estimated 6-MILLION European Jews are widely reported to have lost their lives.

Not surprisingly, though, in the Trumpian World of Neo-Nazi and Neo-Fascist White-Supremacist MAGACRATS, not much that is morally instructive or edifying has been written and published about the Biafran War, even worse, it well appears that not much by way of worthwhile lessons has been learned from the Biafran War, as a remarkable mass of contemporary Ibo/Igbo youths and intellectuals appear to be nostalgically obsessed with a manic revisitation of the Biafran Killing Fields, obtusely and deliberately ignoring the unignorable fact of the “No-Win Situation” that is our Postindustrial Global Village of Drones and other weapons of Mass Destruction.

Now, what all the preceding boils down to is that one cannot seriously begrudge the Jacinta Ngobeses of South Africa for daring to repeat the very same epic follies and myopic socioeconomic and political blunders of their “Northern” Indigenous Continental African Kinsfolk and Neighbors of yesteryear. It is simply their turn and their time that has come; and they have every inalienable and inviolable right to asininely, idiotically and obstinately and ignorantly attempt to reinvent the proverbial wheel once more. Under these tragicomical circumstances, about the only real beef of Yours Truly here is for the morbidly self-righteous likes of March and March’s Ms. Jacinta Ngobese to cavalierly pretend as if an incumbent and a substantive President Ramaphosa who scandalously prefers to hide the humongous liquid cash of $580,000 (USD) inside the couch of his living room or in closet of his house, instead of civically responsibly depositing the same “accountably” in his bank account, assuming that, indeed, the 73-year-old Mr. Ramaphosa has a bank account, is any far less corrupt or administratively incompetent than his “North African” counterpart who chooses to secret his share of a criminally broker cut of a payola racket on the bone-protruding backs of the very people who afforded him their sovereign mandate in the vaults of an offshore bank or investment firm for the personal use of his relatives, cronies, political associates, clansmen and women, as well as himself, of course.

All this, even while also brazenly and self-righteously and recklessly and relentlessly seeking the extradition of a relatively more clever Mega-Thief who, literally caught with his pants down, has wisely and successfully applied the Ananse tentacles of all the appropriate legal levers to put himself way over and out of the reach of his much bigger and more vicious and morally unconscionable counterpart. You see, there is law; and then there is common sense, which is often not obvious to this breed of self-infatuated 24-Hour Economy Crooks and Kooks.

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
E-mail: okoampaahoofekwame@gmail.com

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