Opanin Kwame Why Be So Unfair To Sidney Casely-Hayford – Who Is Only Telling The Truth As He Sees It?

Massa, let me begin by admitting that I do know that I speak and write terrible English. I also admit freely to being a nobody, a buffoon and a semi-literate.

Hopefully, that will save you the trouble of having to call me names - because what I say may not be to the liking of a distinguished and learned fellow like you, Sir!

Massa, why be so unfair to Sidney Casely-Hayford - who has shown so clearly (in his well-written article: "J.J. Rawlings, What Have You Done For Ghana Lately?" http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/artikel.php?ID=153229), that he is a man who is brave enough and cares enough about the former president (someone he so obviously respects and likes!), to put what has obviously fallen on deaf ears in the past, in the public domain: in the hope that it might perhaps trigger a response in the right direction from “he whom the cap fits"?

Massa, Sidney has shown that he is a real friend of the former president’s - and is unlike the many sycophants who unfortunately surround that once-great man who perhaps are too scared to tell him the painful truth: and who do him no good at all with their fawning and their nauseating hero-worshipping.

Yet, it could all have been so different - and the former president could have ended up, today, with an image as stellar as that of the great Madeeba, Nelson Mandela.

God above, what didn't some of us write publicly and say in private to the Victor Smiths of this world, in the past, urging the former C-i-C's inner circle and Victor himself, to let their "employers" (Mr. and Mrs. Rawlings) take the path that would put them on the right side of history in their post-retirement life - all along the very same lines Sidney suggests?

Perhaps it is still not too late, yet, Massa: the former president can do us all one last good turn by helping to bring all Ghanaian progressives together. He could help realign the Ghanaian political landscape, by dissolving the NDC (which has a negative "brand image", if truth be told!) and reversing it into the CPP.

That will be the best way of uniting all Ghanaian progressives under the banner of the party of Nkrumah, after the elections - if the ruling party succeeds in staying in power, yet again.

Perhaps when that wonderful day comes to pass, they can then approach an honest and respected man like Mr. Kofi Annan - and offer him the position of leader of the party Nkrumah founded (alas, in the end, even the great Nkrumah, was let down badly, by the dishonesty and greed, of some of his key people, was he not?).

Massa, if the progressives in Ghana do not come together, I am afraid they will find it rather difficult to dislodge the powerful crooks and greedy tribal supremacist politicians and their fellow travellers in Kokofu-football politics (the insufferable megalomaniacs from the ranks of our traditional rulers!), who now dominate the ruling party, so completely!

Incidentally (and I only say this humbly and only in  matter-of-fact manner!), like Sidney, I too was “privileged' to interview the former president, once upon a time - the very first local media professional to do so after he left office.

That interview appeared in the front page of The Independent newspaper as a matter of fact. It came about because the leader of the minority in parliament, Alban Bagbin, felt that I was (at the time!) being unfair to the former president in my articles about him and their party. He believed that if I met the former president in person, I would not fail to see that he was a sincere man - who loved and cared about his country and its people.

Massa, even today, I still don’t know what to make of the former president - all these years after that plain-speaking interview: which, by the way, was cut short by a power outage at Ridge. At least that is still a recurrent feature of life under the present incompetents - into whose dishonest and greedy hands, Nkrumah’s Ghana, has now fallen.

Hmmm, Ghana – enti yeawiye paa, enia? Asem ebeba debi ankasa! May God bless and protect our hooeland Ghana, always. Long live freedom! Long live Ghana!