Joe-Jato in Jitters?

There is an old, popular saying that: “Whenever death is mentioned, old bones begin to shake.” Actually, I prefer to substitute “jitter” for “shake,” since the former more picturesquely encapsulates the high electrical charge involved in the pitiful reaction of our for this particular discourse. Or, perhaps, even “quaver,” which has a more musical tinge to it. And while, indeed, its therapeutic essence cannot be controverted, not all funerary or terminal situations require musical therapy. Sometimes the most effective balm for a traumatized society is to see, or even hear, the mischief-maker behind such trauma get shaken, literally, to the bones.

Thus it was with quite a modicum of amusement that we learned of Mr. Rawlings' latest tantrum, ineffectually unleashed at a British Foreign Office operative who had, reportedly, said something to the effect that: “President Robert Mugabe [of Zimbabwe] would suffer a similar fate [as] Charles Taylor of Liberia, who is currently standing trial [at] the International Criminal Court in The Hague” (Ghanaweb.com 6/29/07).

Actually, ex-President Taylor is not “standing” trial, as the verbal connotation of the term may readily imply; he is, in reality, “sitting out” on the ICC. For the convicted mass-murderer adamantly refuses to stand up and face a Xerox-copy of his own bloody and dastardly acts, just as Mr. Taylor's twin-brother, who recently celebrated his “diamond” birthday anniversary continues to sanitize and justify his unpardonable criminality in the name of populism.

What got our proverbial horse, in this instance, though, is the temerity with which Mr. June 4th castigated the aforementioned British Foreign Office operative who had aptly dared to call a spade by its real name and function. For Joe-Jato, at least as reported by a media outlet called “Black Britain,” it amounts to the very height of “disrespect” for anybody, especially a non-African, to call on “Comrade” Mugabe to nobly fade into the proverbial sunset, in order to allow a healthy democratic culture to thrive and prosper in the heart of Great Zimbabwe.

In essence, fumed the man who spent much of the 1980s scouring the Scottish Highlands in search of the very father who had roundly rejected him: “No British official or royalty has the right to say those words about a Pan-Africanist like Robert Mugabe.”

Now that is quite an interesting judgment call, isn't it? Particularly, when the caption of the news article in which Joe-Jato made the preceding remark blazed: “Colonial Days Are Over – Rawlings.” Perhaps somebody ought to have reminded Mr. Rawlings during the late 1980s, when the godforsaken judicial assassin, as Ghana's head-of-state, went looking for the elder Mr. Rawlings and having been roundly rebuffed, sat in front of mainstream American television cameras – CBS-TV, to be precise – crying to Ms. Diane Sawyer, of “60 Minutes” and “Good Morning America” fame that the “colonial days” for Ghana had, indeed, been over since 1957, rather than 1987 (or thereabouts) when Comrade Joe-Jato shed his crocodile tears on mainstream American television, to the utter horror, shame, embarrassment and outright disgust of decent Ghanaian citizens to Ms. Diane Sawyer. Actually back then, Joe-Jato had called the renowned network anchor “Madam,” a British colonial salutatory relic.

But what is even more intriguing than any of the preceding is the fact that at the inauguration of the Kwame Nkrumah Mausoleum in Accra, Mr. Rawlings, of all Ghanaian leaders, had stood in front of Nkrumah's tomb self-righteously insisting that the proverbial Show Boy's image and stature as a continental African leader was grossly overblown. Back then, Joe-Jato had burped: “Nkrumah was not perfect; and we ought to always miss no opportunity to drive home the fact that his was a pathologically flawed personality.”

And so how come now that Mr. Rawlings should be castigating a British Foreign Office operative who had, essentially, said the same thing about Mr. Mugabe's unsavory political culture that Mr. Rawlings, a little over a decade ago, had said about Ghana's first premier, Mr. Kwame Nkrumah? Or is it because Mr. Rawlings firmly believes that Mr. Mugabe's mentor was far less of a “Pan-Africanist” than the putative Zimbabwean dictator?

And here, also, it may be of interest to recall that during the early 1980s, when he was gleefully and drunkenly riding on the crest of his popularity, Chairman Rawlings was asked by a journalist of an African magazine whom “The Founder of the June 4th Revolution” considered to be his heroic idol, to which Comrade Joe-Jato brusquely riposted: “We in Ghana have far too many problems to worry about for us to have the luxury of courting heroic personalities.”

Actually, the far less diplomatic Mr. Rawlings had said something like the following: “To hell with heroes! I have no need or use for them. Anyway, what are they? A mess of rotten Yor-ke-Gari?”

In any event, those of us who have been studiously following the bloody career of the “One Man, One Toilet” philosopher have our own quite plausible take on why Mr. June 4th would throw such a tantrum, simply because Mr. Mugabe appears to have been brought off his high “revolutionary” horse. And it is the strikingly eerie fact that with ex-President Taylor shivering before the International Criminal Court in The Hague and Mr. Mugabe apparently next in the judicial line-up, it likely would not be long before the souls of his victims would be wanting Mr. Rawlings to join his peers. For having predictably escaped virtually unscathed – actually emboldened – by Ghana's toothless National Reconciliation Commission so-called, Togbui Agbotui finds it extremely unthinkable that anybody would want him to share the same prison cell as Messrs. Taylor and the late Slobodan Milosevic, among a legion of other godforsaken souls, of course.

And here, also, it bears recalling that this was the same Ghanaian “revolutionary” who stood before a plenary session of the United Nations General Assembly and rapturously proclaimed Nigeria's Gen. Sani Abacha as the best postcolonial leader that Africa's most populous nation ever had.

Indeed, it cannot be gainsaid that the “colonial days” are over; but, of course, neither could it be gainsaid that the “days of justice” – or reckoning – are just beginning!

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., teaches English and Journalism at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is the author of “When Dancers Play Historians and Thinkers” (2007). E-mail: [email protected].