Opinion: A Crab Does Not Beget a Bird, Chairman Rawlings – By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

Ghana’s former President Jerry John Rawlings

It is a nauseating ritual of massive political failure that Ghana’s longest-reigning strongman shamelessly continues to celebrate every year, in a wistful attempt to self-righteously evoke memories of a mutiny falsely disguised and insolently paraded around the country as a corruption-cauterizing revolution (See “NDC Didn’t Lose Election Because of ‘Lame Horse’ – Rawlings Replies Mahama on June 4” MyJoyOnline.com / Modernghana.com 6/4/17).

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This year, the fast-aging human equivalent of a grisly bear took his decidedly jaded roadshow to the Upper-West Region’s capital of Wa and vapidly got “installed” Bagrepie, a local traditional chieftain, for whatever that may be worth. The mathematically challenged JoyOnline.com reporter claimed that several government officials had traveled a distance of 562 km from Accra, the nation’s capital, to Wa; which is the equivalent of some 350 miles. But actually, these largely Made-By-Rawlings politicians had traveled at least some 692 km, or the equivalent of 430 miles.

What is most significant to note here, though, is the fact that increasingly, the fat, pot-bellied retired Ghana Airforce’s flight-lieutenant is coming to the grim realization of the fact that his so-called Housecleaning Revolutionary Exercise, rigged up on the dubious and vacuous tenets of “Probity, Transparency, Accountability and Justice,” have literally fallen flat on their prats nearly four decades on. This four-cornered credo of the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) was a massive flop right from the get-go, as I have had the opportunity to elucidate in column after column for nearly three decades now; and so it is not clear just what he means, when the ancient Chairman alludes to “the lost values of June 4.”

To be certain, there were more acts of injustice committed in the pat and facile name of “revolution” against both ordinary Ghanaian civilians and the military and the police alike on that fateful day in 1979, and for the following three months, in particular against senior officers of the Ghana Armed Forces who had served in government. The Acheampong and Akuffo juntas, to be precise.

On Sunday, June 4, 2017, Chairman Rawlings soberly appeared to have seen the proverbial light. Perhaps belatedly. “Believe it or not, the greed of [our politicians] today is a thousand times more than what these Generals were executed for.” This is exactly the same line of argument that many of us avid observers of Ghanaian politics have been retailing all along. The infamous Butcher-of-Sogakope added, “Under past NDC governments, some officials amassed wealth and used such money as a political weapon to become Kingmakers.”

Actually, it was the founding-patriarch of the so-called National Democratic Congress who proudly and pontifically inaugurated this season of wanton rot in our national political culture. But, of course, I was thinking about political thieves like the Ahwoi Brothers, the Tsikata Brothers and the Rawlings Clan itself. Otherwise, how could these impudent Robber-Barons have been able to provide some of the most expensive educational opportunities abroad for their children and grandchildren? What with the self-righteous cannibalizing of state-owned landed and real-estate properties by these revolutionary masqueraders?

Finally, we may, refreshingly, be getting somewhere therapeutic and cathartic as a nation. Yes, Chairman Agbotui-Rawlings, I agree with you 100-percent that “Believe it or not, the greed of the Mahama Posse, and your own as well, is a thousand times more than what the Generals you summarily executed were executed for.” May Divine Providence have mercy on you, Mr.-Chairman, and the rest of us, of course.

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

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