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02.03.2015 Feature Article

Osafo Marfo Must "Come Again"

Osafo Marfo Must Come Again
02.03.2015 LISTEN

A thousand thoughts jostled inside my mind after I listlessly listened to Osafo Marfo's ethnocentric twaddle and bathos. I couldn't stop wondering why someone I held in awe and thought of as a financial virtuoso would intrepidly besmirch himself. When he fatuously and luridly claimed on radio that the tape had been doctored, the cadence of his voice betrayed him with something close to a gnawing distress arising from a sense of guilt.

To my utter dismay,some New patriotic party faithfuls have sacrificed condemning these dyslogistic remarks on the altar of blaming a perceived fifth columnist within the party. As expected, they have gone into spin overdrive, valiantly trying to do the damage control.

While i will be the first to admit that the truth has been buried within the sands of time, given that Ghana's gold, bauxite, cocoa, coffee, oil, just to name a few find themselves on Akan lands, it would be balefully insidious to gratuitously posit that by virtue of the resources, prestige, presumed worth and the linguistic preponderance the Akans have, the presidency should be their birth right. In a pluralist society such as ours, unique ethnic groups must coexist side by side and the distinctiveness of each group is considered a trait worth having in a dominant culture.

By now it ought to be clear to the upper echelons of the New Patriotic party that they have failed to appeal to the believability coefficient and trust of non Akans because of such divisive and ethnocentric epithets. It behoves them to keep government on its toes. When Osafo Marfo's jarring and dissonant voice dropped to a hoarse truculence on the tape, I thought he was going to tell his party executives how they could leverage on the mirthless Mahama style of governance especially in the face of the lingering and parlous energy crises. Hardly can it be gainsaid that the New patriotic party has not given the Ghanaian people the kind of credible opposition that will pass muster for a line of least resistance.

It goes without saying that they have not learnt any lesseon from some clangers they committed in the past. In 2012, the New patriotic party flagbearer, came under standoffish censure and obloquy for his "yen Akanfo" clarion call, which many thought had in no small measure, some semblance of ethnocentricism.What about Honourable Kenedy Agyepong's genocidal hydra, when he vacuously called on a particular tribe to rise against the other which to all intents and purposes contributed to their 2012 presidential election defeat? I strongly believe that heretic and slothful Ghanaian politicians must be frontally told that they would only be shooting themselves in the foot if they gleefully pit one ethnic group against the other in a bid to win political power.

Indeed a spasm of grief and consternation twisted my face rhythmically when an Accra based radio station, putatively sympathetic to the National democratic congress, impishly played the alleged “Osafo Marfo tape" in an attempt to stir a hornet's nest. Over the years, the National democratic congress have gleefully tagged the New patriotic party as a high-falutin Akan domineering political party. They capitalize on this Achilles heel of the NPP and garner support from non-Akan speaking communities all over Ghana. It was in keeping with the point stated above that President Mahama, in the wake of the 2012 presidential election, pellucidly asked the people of the Northern region to vote for him because he is one of them, a Northerner. He went further to say that if the NPP wanted to win votes there, then they should have made a Northerner their flagbearer.

Of course, other ethnical comments have been made in the past by high profile personalities in government.Nii lantey Vanderpuye also belligerently squealed that no individual of an Akan descent would be allowed to register at the Odododiodio electoral area, and that, that area is for Gas. This was prior to the 2012 elections.Fiifi Kwetey is on record to have talked a blue streak in the proverbial Wiki leaks that a Muslim can never be president of Ghana.

The comical aspect of all these is that when one of the two dominant political parties in Ghana is hauled over the coals for making such ethnocentric comments, in a knavish attempt to make it nugatory, the other is tarred with the same brush. In effect nothing really is gained other than getting each other's knickers in a twist.

I am decidedly woebegone as I type this article. Ghana was the richest country in Africa when she attained independence.Dr Kwame Nkrumah introduced the boarding house system in colleges and secondary schools to ensure unity in diversity. Today, Ghana is polarized as a result of a vicissitude of suspicion and hatred among the various ethnic groups. What makes it more troubling is the fact that, this brazen and putrefied politics of division is being spearheaded by well-educated members of the public. While the developed nations are fastidiously developing sound policies in their quest for faster growth, we have been unconscionably plunged into insipid and tralatitious politics of backwardness.

Like the tired Ghanaian aphorism that says, "kwasia na on sesa na dwen", to wit, "it is only a fool who doesn't change his mind", it is not too late for the beleaguered NPP higher-up to publicly apologise for his awful ethnocentric gaffe. Indeed Osafo Marfo must "come again".

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