??bob? ba! Coming events, they say, cast their shadows. You stage a coup that no one needed. You write a constitution you think will keep you and your gang of choppers from the national money pot in power forever. Your illegal acts get retrospectively converted into legal actions. Somewhere along the road, you realise president for life was impossible. Your own people wanted you out because they wanted to chop chop like you were. Eventually, you unleash upon the motherland avaricious insatiable sharp-toothed baby choppers who have turned out as the most corrupt of the corrupted.
Now you start fretting, confused and unable to do anything about stopping what you taught others to do. First, you condemn the constitution you wrote which promoted corruption under you. Thinking you are the smartest, you wrote that people should declare their assets before and after leaving political positions. To encourage chop chop, what they were to write was to be sealed forever. You see, your ‘punish corruption’ is not happening because it cannot. So now you want the whole constitution you wrote and signed to be jettisoned for another one that would be written to stop corruption.
As?m b?ba dabi; because in your enthusiasm to dodge what you saw as poverty condition to find some riches small, you cleared everything you considered an obstacle in your path. You killed, you maimed, you tortured; you brutalized innocent people. You inflicted pain on innocent people so you could enjoy. So you don’t even know; neither can you tell, whether rewriting the constitution will save you from your worry of seeing the undeserved chop.
Now you are promoting your daughter, thinking the gullible among my compatriots would ignore everything and throw more wealth to your amp?br? daughter. I haven’t seen what your daughter has done in life to enjoy from the suffering of the poor in the motherland. I remember, sometime ago, someone was paying for her schooling in a prestigious institution abroad. You sat on the motherland’s wealth, using the resources the way you saw fit. Even then, you could not afford to pay her school fees; yet a friend had made enough money in the same motherland to pay.
I just heard the daughter of someone you deprived of life warn you about the consequences of your desire to rewrite the constitution to punish others. I would have loved to hear what you and your daughter think about that. Many thought the National Reconciliation Commission (NRC) had put our past somewhere so we can move forward. Now you are stirring the hornet’s nest. You want to open the Pandora’s Box the NRC sealed all your iniquities in. If you are unaware, there’s a lot of horror in that box to blow you up into smithereens if you succeed in getting it opened.
Maybe you can handle those of us without daughters that way. But people have daughters. You just heard Odartey-Wellington’s daughter caution you. I know at least one Limann lawyer daughter. And I know at least one Acheampong daughter lawyer. Even with your Pandora Box misdeeds sealed, and with the indemnity thing you want chucked out tightly in place, if the daughters decide to take you on, they would LEGALLY blow you away.
Twe twe as?m bra na wob?hu s? biribi annk?ka papa a, anka papa nnye tr?d?. You make it seem like the indemnity clause was smuggled. But you SIGNED IT. You don’t regret demolition. You will demolish again. You don’t regret the killings. There is nothing you regret.
You won’t believe coup man Gowon is alive. Or maybe the disenchanted coup maker is so noisy because in the case of Gowon his ‘overthrower’ was killed in an overthrow. Or maybe when you come near death under Akuffo or Abacha, and you manage to become a ‘civilian’ president, you cannot shut up when out of office. So Uncle Sege and Papa Gyato keep talking. Silence is golden; otherwise why would they say better be quiet and be considered a fool than to speak foolishly. ‘It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool, than to talk and remove all doubt of it,’ is the quote. Our people say if you become too wise, you greet sheep forgetting they don’t have your expected capacity to respond.
Today, the young ones sing: ‘Obiara w? ne Master.’ Acheampong’s version was ‘Nea ?bebo wo mmaae a wo se obi ntumi wo.’ General Kotoka said he had broken the myth surrounding Kwame Nkrumah. Lieutnant Yeboah told him he was a bogus politician who had forgotten his military assignment, as he and his tiny squad took the general down. True Generals like Charles Mohammed Bawa and Neville Alexander Odartey-Wellington, loyally fight to defend their motherland. They don’t betray the motherland by staging coups.
By Kwasi Ansu-Kyeremeh