If we think politicians cannot play the prank, we are being simply naïve…And if Adam could not protect himself in the Garden of Eden setting, what would a wooden head son do? So, the animal in Cain, father of the Chinese, showed.
That animal retorted in the face of God: Am I my brother’s keeper?
Earlier, God had warned him, saying “Cain, evil is at your door”. He laughed. “What is evil?” In that, he pirated Pilate, who asked Jesus: “What is Truth?”
Jesus would later warn Judas: “You, you will sell me for Roman coins…”
But Judas, like Cain, ignored the import of the message.
But my gripe this week is not about Cain, Judas, Pilate or pirates; or, for that matter, Napo and Emperor Napoleon, who responded, in clenched fists, to his inquiring Ministers when he was asked to put the State first in a matter about his craze for war.
“The state?” Napoleon had retorted: “I am the State.” “L’état? C’est moi” That’s the French version, for those of you who decided to dodge French classes because it sounded like romance between a Romeo and Juliet. But that has been the sin of the sons of Adam, particularly the African politician.
It is in our blood
If we blame Napo for the uppercut on the chin of the Otumfuo, we must go back to the Bible, and start from KA Busia, through Kutu Acheampong to Rawlings, JAK, JM, Old Boy Billy…I won’t smack JEAM, however, over his Dze W Fie Asem because we know this was a poor, harmless “sad, old padre” engaging in humour.
When Lawyer Nii Ayikoi Otoo told Justices of the Supreme Court during the infamous Election 2012 Petition that there is a demone [feminine French for demon] in every politician, the ace Ga lawyer knew exactly what he was saying, though it was no excuse for his political fingerling and Journalist, for that matter, to poke a Justices of the Supreme Court.
It appears that from entertainment, including football and boxing, to administration and conduct in business life, everything for the Ghanaian, even including taking penalties, has been sweat. The grace of people or personalities conducting or completing or committing to excellence in public state organizational and personal lives is becoming a missing link in our aspiration and desire for excellence.
That’s how come we have military officers just graduating hallucinating about being Presidents in April 1967. But that was also why we had a team that had worked out programmes with the British Colonial government being jettisoned by one man’s plot to become head of the pack when a beautiful cooperation was already in place for national independence. But, again, that is an academic argument.
So, we came to have Assemblymen and Assemblywomen who saw nothing wrong with attempting to fight MPs already ensconced in their constituencies, just to leap to the next stage – lettered or unlettered. On and on, we began to have MMDCEs also plotting to remove MPs – both in the opposition party or the ruling administration in all the tenures.
It has been a whole cycle of stress, sweat, attrition, dog eat dog and crabs-in-a-bucket culture…for us as a nation.
Records
Again, I won’t touch Kwame Nkrumah. As a cornered rat, he must have had reason for skewing political power for political profit. Being in a situation that a cat finds itself from a cat-eating community, he must be awake 24 hours a day in a 24-hour state economy and other businesses of state to perform and enjoy his tenure…He had hopped atop a tiger, and he must evermore live with that risk.
And I suspect he knew, like Idi Amin or Sanni ‘The Butcher’ Abatcha, that it could not be forever in Flagstaff House or Aso Rock.
So, we would be also having Methodist, Christian, educated academic Dr KA Busia. And the records are that he was so vehement over previous appointees that he became infamous for his verbal excesses in a case that he lost in the Supreme Court called Apollo Koomini…
He was strident and shrill over that urge to defrock Kwame Nkrumah’s bureaucrats and technocrats.
It was as if those people had raped his mother. Yet, there were raging issues that should have drawn more sweat and stress for the cameras and GBC, VOA or BBC and Deutsche Welle newsrooms.
Kutu, too, who griped during KA Busia’s tenure would be ignoring calls from the Bar Association and Professional Bodies Association of Ghana to throw jibes at students who parents in rural communities were educating from palm oil sales.
Hilla Limann was one of the most harmless Presidents Ghana would ever had; and to think that he was chosen tactically by the People’s National Party (PNP) as a compromise candidate in uniting the nation with a Parliament that would be Ghanaian and alive to its duties…
But, what about cousins Jerry Rawlings and Courage Quarshigah doing it to themselves and the Panins and Kakra Essamuahs; or Sekondi lawyers from NPP and NDC calling each other names, with the NDC chap citing the then NPP opposition as rats. Kusie…It is, I insist, in our genes…Everything irrelevance is in our genes, otherwise we would not be going endlessly to the IMF…
ET Mensah…Rest in Peace…. At Teshie, he would be referring to any Ga who voted for JA Kufour as odonkpo (donkey) or ugly beast. Josiah Aryeh’s GaDangme jibes before he was trapped by a GaDangme chieftain, with Rawlings almost excusing him because, in his very informed opinion, there were others in the NDC who were worse than jailbirds.
JAK himself, just like Limann, hit the roof against ET Mensah, I suppose in political retaliation over the Odonkpo jibe in an indigenous Ga community. That was during the inauguration of a bridge between Prampram and Ningo, the twin fishing communities bordering Ada. Again, it is in our genes, as Ayikoi Otoo lamented in attempting to save the angry MP aspirant for Okai Koi North claiming to go independent.
Sparing Napo, tackling the issues
If Napo is considering committing suicide for offending Otumfuo, like Judas did, he should pardon himself, because even Mahama, like JA Kufour, reacting to a demonstration that the NPP professionals and GUTA Boys would be embarking on later, called for a Sledge Hammer that, indeed, came up from the nozzles of a state police to break heads and break one eye into the head.
So, NPP or NDC; propaganda or facts, what is more compelling is the issues, not the braggadocio and tumbling from the fingerling.
How today’s Nkrumaists vote
I may not have to blame Napo because if the researchers are on top of their jobs and research is going into communication, the Research Team would have known and communicated to Napo that Nkrumaists in Greater Accra and up inti the Northern Regions vote more for the NPP than NDC. Ask Nana Akomea, who must be familiar with the voting trend at Kaneshie-Awudome, Mpamplo neighbourhoods…the children of the Nkrumaists have since 1996 been voting for NPP.
Awudome Estates housed Kwane Nkrumah’s security personnel and other party apparatchiki. Ask IC Quaye and he would tell you that from Kokomlemle though New Town and Abavana Juction and Alajo to Kotobabi, the children and grandchildren of the Nkrumaists largely vote NPP. Check the Caantonments, North and South Labone…Third generation CPPists are voting NPP…
It is the same pattern in Adabraka, Ringway Estates and Nyaneba named after Kwame Nkrumah’s mother. But, it is also the same in South La Estates. Yet, I won’t see coins from the Research Fund coming my way. Should I blame it therefore on Dan Botwe or the Communication Minister? Or take the Research Team to School in grassroots communication which twaddle the loony Russian Communists have since been calling propaganda?
This is AD 2024 and a Breaking of the Eight. It is the year of rising and falling of kingdoms as the theologians insist.
That means developing fighting – not noise-making – strategies. Jericho fell long ago. What we have today is Hamas. The battle is not against Nkrumah; it is against JM and all that he and his men represent from 1992 till date.
By Abena Bawuaah