Yo, “Professor” Lungu Lungu, Let Me Tickle Your Funny Bone!

He describes himself as “ 'Professor' Lungu,” but nobody needs to possess even a high-school diploma to aptly and plausibly conclude that he, very likely, is one of those hundreds of disappointed “America Been-tos” recruited to teach grade-school – or elementary – English to Japanese children. For, his literary skills are borderline or marginal and almost everything he has had posted on Ghanaweb.com verges on plagiarism, or simply stringing up the ideas of other writers, pastiche style, and blindly assenting with them. His writing verges on plagiarism because one would be hard put to locate a single cognitive flash of originality, and so it is quite strange that he has yet to be brought up on any such charges, or even be aptly called up on his abject lack of intellectual acuity. I don't even think this poor excuse for cognitive ratiocination is a Ghana. The guy is simply too daft to be deemed a Ghanaian intellectual, and then even a “Professor.” Still, as I said to one critic who recently presumed to run yours truly, literally, out of town, “Professor” Lungu, too, is definitely entitled to his own stupidity, though his brand of abject stupidity is one that Ghanaians can ill-afford.

Where I come from in Ghana, “Professor” Lungu would since long have been committed to a mental institution. He may also well be, in addition to an economic exile in Tokyo-Japan, an intellectual exile, one with no gray-matter in his cranial vault. The latter may pretty much explain the fact that this poor excuse for humanity is neither logically coherent nor rhetorically articulate, and so it is rather curious that he has, somehow, managed to cultivate quite a remarkable audience at all; he may even have one or two people who could fairly aptly be described as his “following.” But I doubt very much that such following goes beyond the outright tangential or seasonal, of the kind and type that good, old Thomas Paine poignantly labeled as “Summer Soldiers” some two-hundred and odd years ago. One such soldier reared his patently ugly head in the Ghanaweb.com chat-room recently, because he had erroneously presumed the “Lungu Lungu” man to have gone to his rescue over a brainless article that Mr. Agama Lizard-Head wrote a little while ago, presuming to make short work of the indelible cultural and political significance of names.

Needless to say, one must really be in desperate need of face-saving rescue, or grace, to have “Professor” Whiff Lungu go to bat for that unfortunate self-imprecated one. And to fully appreciate how intellectually servile and bankrupt the Lungu man is, one only needs to recall how this disappointed Japan exile teamed up with a white-American racist professor, Dr. Peter Schwab, once in scurrilously claiming that the moral crime of adultery was widely celebrated all over the African continent. Back then, I had let this intellectual paraplegic off the hook, because so bloodily had “Professor” Lungu-Lungu gotten condignly mauled in the Ghanaweb.com chat-room that I did not see the need to deliver the proverbial coup-de-grace and thus facilely take him out of his misery. In sum, if he had any sense of shame or dignity, “Professor” Lungu-Lungu would have long since recoiled into himself; his name says it all, and whoever gave it to him knew this SOB inside out!

Still, but for the sake of a well-meaning Ghanaweb.com chat-room interlocutor, yours truly was not going to rejoin “Professor” Lungu's slush of turd, for it more than amply exposes the writer for what he objectively is, a patently and incurably uncouth and uncivilized political scam-artist! Then also, it does not get better than to have Akadu Mensema, unsolicited, go to bat for you; I have yet to clearly determine the gender ID of Akadu Mensema, though I have a strong feeling that the interlocutor sporting the foregoing name is a woman, and very likely a quite pretty one, based on a few good-natured, albeit rather off-color, exchanges that we have had in the past. I also have a feeling that Akadu Mensema is an astute and keen observer of the postcolonial Ghanaian political landscape, one who “Professor” Lungu would, definitely, have an extremely difficult time trying to hold his own against, as it were.

You see, when somebody calls himself a “Professor” and does not know the glaringly distinctive difference between a “scholar” and an “intellectual,” then, of course, that unfortunate fellow had better be pitied rather than damned. And here, for the benefit of both “Professor” Lungu and his ilk, as well as other well-meaning readers who might not know, the difference between an “intellectual” and a “scholar” is almost akin to the relationship between a passably intelligent student and an “erudite” disciplinary authority. In other words, almost every college-educated person who can reasonably sustain a discourse, with gravitas, on such significant national issue as a Freedom of Information Bill, may quite aptly be described as an intellectual. But I must also quickly highlight the fact that one does not need to possess a college degree in order to be reckoned as an intellectual, just as, to be certain, not all college-degree holders qualify to be called intellectuals, our most typical and ready example being “Professor” Lungu.

On the other hand, to be described as a “scholar” implies that one has far surpassed the basic and propaedeutic level, or stage, of the average intellectual into becoming an authoritative figure in both the critical acquisition, absorption, organization and dissemination of vital information, as opposed to the kind of trashy trivia pathologically and incessantly indulged and purveyed by the “Professor” Lungus of the Ghanaweb.com cyberspace, for only one example. And as one astute Ghanaweb.com chat-room denizen aptly pointed out, long before “Lungu Lungu” heard about anything called a Freedom of Information Bill, it had already been proposed by the Danquah-Busia scions of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP). In other words, “Professor” Lungu is just another narcissistic parakeet so morbidly fascinated with the imitative echo of his own coarse and obscene snarls that he has actually come to deliriously fancy himself as either the very author and/or poster-boy for Ghana's Freedom of Information Bill.

Then again, isn't it rather insufferably presumptuous for the Tokyo-exiled “Professor” Lungu to think that he can impugn both the personal and professional integrity of Nana Addo-Dankwa Akufo-Addo, the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) Presidential Candidate for Election 2008, as well as the man who single-handedly crafted the Repeal of the Criminal Libel Law which accords “Professor” Lungu rhetorical carte blanche to actually malign Nana Akufo-Addo and get away with it? In any case, where was the Lungu-Lungu “Professor” when Kume-Preko and all this were going on? Talk of chutzpah Lungu!

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is the author of 17 books, including “Dr. J. B. Danquah: Architect of Modern Ghana” (iUniverse.com, 2005). E-mail: [email protected].