Rawlings Has No Political Wings Outside of Ghana These Days

I was drawn to this story which was first published by Graphic.com.gh and posted in the General News section of Ghanaweb.com (1/3/19), not because it was of any particular significance, but primarily because it strikingly reflected the abject hypocrisy that characterized the political ideology and the violent and bloody thrust of the 20-year period during which Ghana’s former Airforce Flt-Lt., Jerry John Rawlings, imperiously and peremptorily dominated the country’s political landscape. That most bleak period from the end of the 1970s to the end of the Millennium, so-called, has been characterized as a veritable Reign-of-Terror by scholars and historians with a front-seat view of the entire bloody experiment in ethnic cleansing and chauvinism of Fascist proportions.

Which was why I was quite amused to “hear” Chairman Rawlings presume to excoriate President Donald John Trump for recklessly attempting to make today’s world the most dangerous that it could possibly be, simply because this admittedly gung-ho white-American nationalist, and some quite authoritative politicians and writers have even described him as downright racist, has vowed to walk away from something called the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty (INFT) that Presidents Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev allegedly signed in Washington in the 1980s. I was a college undergraduate then and can almost confidently attest that the real treaty that we all bore witness to on live television, right here in the United States, in Washington, DC, to be exact, probably had a very different nominal designation or name than the one whose promised abrogation Mr. Rawlings seems to be so morbidly jittery about.

Anyway, it has been said time without number that unconscionable and pathological butchers invariably tend to be morbidly more afraid of death via military slaughter than the rest of us “nobody” humans. You see, in spite of the possibility of the clear danger that the world would be facing, that is, should Mr. Trump walk away from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty which, by the way, we are told, was singularly instrumental in ending the Cold War, nevertheless, I get a real kick out of any moment that the Sogakope Mafia Goon begins to perspire and get drenched in a coat-sweat, because human forces imbued with powers and influences far beyond his own are threatening to snuff the living daylight out of this half-Scottish waif, in much the same way that Mr. Rawlings did to hundreds of thousands of Ghanaians some two decades ago. I also tend to believe that Chairman Rawlings appears to take President Trump far more seriously than the rest of us, because these two half-Scottish clones – and some would even say, clowns – are fraternal spitting images of one another, more strikingly so than the half-Ewe former Ghanaian strongman cares to know or is capable of recognizing.

Which, obviously, is not to either say or imply that none of us Wretched of the Earth – my profound apologies to Dr. Frantz Fanon – has absolutely no right to raise the sort of concern evoked by a chaotic nuclearized world of the kind that Chairman Rawlings seems to be so risibly jittery about. I can almost see the man who rudely and adamantly ignored passionate pleas from then US President Jimmy (James) Carter to spare the lives of the 8 former military rulers that Chairman Rawlings so adamantly, cannibalistically and summarily executed by firing squad in June 1979. Today, as if having soberly realized the folly of his wayward ways, Chairman Rawlings never lets any prime opportunity slip by without remorsefully telling the general Ghanaian public, or anybody who cares to listen, for that matter, that the “Generals whom I personally executed were ten times far less corrupt than former mentees of mine like John Dramani Mahama and Johnson Asiedu-Nketia.” How strange and interesting time softens even the most heartless among yesteryear’s hoodlum pack.

*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
January 3, 2019
E-mail: [email protected]