Comment - The Unfunny Show
Hollywood could possibly move down to West Africa to get not only scripts for their 'B' movies but actors as well.
It is doubtful whether even Hollywood that land of fantasy could possibly have dreamt up the 'life is stranger than fiction' scenarios being regularly enacted all over the west coast of Africa by soldiers who, unable to cope with their own chosen professions, have taken on the roles of self-appointed messiahs and rescuers.
Over in Ghana, the Flight-Lieutenant show has been going on now for two years and the messianic leader of the revolution now seems totally taken with delusions of grandeur. In one of his characteristic performances on radio and television on Ghana's independence day, his message was 'all of you are to blame, every other Ghanaian is to blame, everybody else has changed (apparently for the worse) except me - this sole knight in shining armour'.
The irony of it all obviously doesn't hit him that in this country of his estimated 14 million people, everybody else should have changed for the worse except him. He elevates himself to the ranks of the gods on mount Olympus looking down on the foibles of mere mortals below when he claims: "it is not me, it is not I who have changed it is you. I have always fought for a dedicated cause, I have always fought for justice..."
Admittedly, there is some such saying in Ghana which translates that if one doesn't blow one's own trumpet, nobody will know one is out there. But surely when it gets to the state where the whole world is populated by evil people and you are the only good and upright person left, the normal judgement of society is that you are no longer in a position to distinguish between good and evil.
But then of course, it has always been known that the line between genius and lunacy is very thin indeed and sometimes blurs in fact and history is full of the single genius unable to convince the majority of the righteousness of his ideas and actions and is thus deemed heretic, traitor or madman who is justified and vindicated years later when society comes to accept what he had been expostulating many generations earlier. The Roman Catholic Church has after all, now, decided that Socrates was right and the Church wrong. So possibly Ghana does have one upright, energetic man full of original ideas trying to lead 14 million.
That would possibly explain why it is believed that only the Rawlings method will save Ghana, that is why the Rawlings philosophy of a system of government devised by him should be the only one good for Ghana and that is why Flt-Lt. Rawlings has reached the point where he now believes that his lone voice and his mind represent the will of the people. For how else could he have arrived at the preposterous conclusion that "the people in their practical wisdom have rejected this sham democracy" parliamentary democracy being his object of derision. When did he consult the people and when did they give him this verdict?
It is becoming obvious that every time any group or organisation holds elections in Ghana and they are won by people that are deemed not to have been converted into the Rawlings faith, then they are criminals and enemies in the leadership of that organisation, according to the PNDC government.
The National Union of Ghana Students (NUGS) suffered this persecution until the universities were closed, now the Trades Union Congress is the favourite whipping horse.
At the beginning of the Rawlings regime, the TUC was attacked, the leadership chased out and an attempt was made for a take-over by 'the workers'. After almost two years, the TUC finally managed to assert itself and hold elections and the government was known to have sponsored candidates considered sympathetic to the faith, such candidates lost in fair and keenly contested elections.
Suddenly the leadership of the TUC is said to contain 'enemies and criminals who are fomenting confrontational issues.' Flt-Lt. Rawlings calls such people 'ignorant' because they are asking for 300 cedis per day minimum wage for their workers. Such a figure in a situation where 300 cedis is generally regarded as the minimum required to cook one meal to feed a family of four in other circumstances, TUC leaders asking for such wages will be lynched by their leaders as not asking enough for them.
Two years ago, Flt-Lt. Rawlings was telling the world that he was unimpressed by the mumbo-jumbo of external economic factors, and was only interested in the fact that his dearly beloved workers to whom he had devoted his life were unable to buy chicken for christmas because they couldn't afford the 70 cedis cost. Today those workers are deemed ignorant by him because he says they cannot make 'something' out of his proffered statistics that in Africa as a whole, foreign exchange earnings and import capacity fell from 72.5 billion dollars in 1982 to 63.6 billion dollars in 1983.
But then the workers have never claimed to understand the intricacies of international economics, they have to live with the reality of hunger and starvation.
Just as the line between genius and lunacy is thin there is an even thinner line between the sublime and the ridiculous. Thus the Flight-Lieutenant himself happened upon the clearest and most apt analysis of his performance so far in his independence anniversary speech: "there is evidence of mounting despair. deepening apathy and growing withdrawal and rejection of national responsibility on the part of the ordinary people".
Nobody could have put it better - the Flight Lieutenant should not look beyond his nose for the answer.
