The Dawn of Déjà Vu

The new presidential spokesman for Prof. John Evans Atta-Mills looks to be a quite interesting character, though I am not holding my breath in anticipation of the dawn of a democratic dispensation, as he enthusiastically claims. There is a saying among the rural folks of the southern United States which runs as follows: “You may gussy up a pig with a lipstick; but it is still a pig.” In sum, the Atta-Mills administration is not likely to be any remarkably different from that of Massa Boss Rawlings'.

Already, the former tax guru has begun talking about forging a government of national unity, even while also vigorously pursuing the rule of law and order. I bet that we shall soon know what exactly the latter means, and it is almost certain not to be a very pleasant and a pretty sight. For one cannot expect professional and congenital arm-twisters morphing into olive-branch wielders and advocates overnight. But then, if the initial propagandistic fooling pleases the majority of the Ghanaian electorate, then, by all means, it is their ball, let them play it!

Just listen to Mr. Mahama Ayariga, the new presidential spokesman play Pope Self-Righteous, and it becomes boringly clear that the next four years are unlikely to be any better than during the last eight years, when the NDC was comfortably ensconced in the parliamentary opposition. Back than, all that the likes of Monsieur Ayariga did was criticize the Kufuor government and organize rampant boycotts of parliamentary proceedings and then get paid, big time.

Well, now Mr. Ayariga has something hypocritically refreshing for those tone-deaf and addled Ghanaian citizens who really believe in the dawn of a new day, rather than THE DAWN OF DÉJA VU! For instance, just last Friday the presidential hot-hair blower commandeered a Kumasi radio station and griped about how profligate and out of kilter the Kufuor government had been regarding the construction of the resplendent Golden Jubilee House, located on the same spot that the equally temporally lavish Flagstaff House stood in the 1960s.

After launching into a homiletic about how the NDC government which, by the way, is not known for undertaking massive and widespread development projects across the country, would have used the money involved in the building of Jubilee House for the construction of hospitals and expansion of universities, the former Bawku-Central MP was asked if President Atta-Mills intended to turn Jubilee House, for instance, into a national museum for the sobering exhibition of postcolonial governmental profligacy. And this was Mr. Ayariga's all-too-predictable and fatuously hypocritical answer: “They have built it for the state and we cannot allow it to go to waste, so we would inhabit it.”

What is risible about the foregoing is that I had thought the pontifically economical presidential microphone was going to say something quite NDC-like such as, “We intend to convert Jubilee House into an Atta-Mills Academy for Presidential Run-Offs. And then we would cuff Old Sleepy Eyes and dump that dirty old political double-crosser into the Osagyefo Institute of Pan-Africanist Political Proving Ground, at Nsawam.”

Still, what made me feel like giving the Ayariga man a bloody nose, was when he called on Ghanaian journalists to “collaborate” with him in the unreserved service of democratic shit-bombing.

Credit: Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., 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 “Dr. J. B. Danquah: Architect of Modern Ghana” (iUniverse.com, 2005). E-mail: [email protected].