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Recently, a curious somebody asked me if I had to write that one great epic novel, or even volume of poetry, on 55 years of postcolonial Ghanaian history, what would the title. ?Trokosi Boys in the Sunshine,? I immediately shot back without any second thoughts whatsoever. For as far as I have objectively been able to verify, the last half-century of Ghanaian history has entailed the violent and steady ?Trokosification? of the country. At the time of this writing, for instance, both the Chairman of the National Council of State and the Speaker of our National Assembly are ?Trokosi Nationalists.?
With the political ascendancy of the Trokosi Nationalists and their rapid and steady domination of the Ghanaian political landscape, largely violent and immitigably antagonistic in nature, has conversely occurred the precipitous decline in political and economic power of the Akan majority populace. And with the occurrence of the latter process has also been fabricated the myth of the exponential increase in the Anlo-Ewe population. Thus, today, we are deviously informed that the Anlo-Ewe account for a humongous 13-percent of the country?s population, while the Akan population, originally numbering roughly 50-percent of the country?s total population, it could actually be more, has rapidly declined to some 44-percent.
Such acute decline can, of course, be accounted for in terms of the quite massive, albeit very recent, immigration of the endangered Akan ethnic sub-nationality into the Diaspora, largely the United States and Canada and other parts of Western Europe, in particular the British Isles. Another factor has also come in the form of tactical and/or strategically devised intermarriages, which has meant that the largely matrilineal Akan have been swallowed up by Ghanaians of patrilineal heritage, who have expediently colluded to rewrite our national customary laws into one that privileges patrilineal heritage and patriarchy over and above subscribers of matrilineal inheritance.
Call it xenophobia or ethnic bigotry, but the fact of the matter is that if systematic efforts are not made in the offing, in less than a half-century from now, the globally famous and industrious and ingenious Akan people who gave Ghana and the rest of the world the Kente cloth, the Gold Weights, the Ananse Story, the Akuaba Dolls and lots of Cocoa Beans, among a slew of other products of genius, would have decidedly become a relic of ancient history.
Trokosification has also significantly retarded the progressive and the imperative need for the adoption and development of a common language of national sociopolitical, economic and cultural discourse and instruction in the educational sector. The combined result has been the rapid atrophy of Akan cultural mores and philosophical values, while at the same time the mastery of English, the country?s official language, has steadily declined, with the resultant decline in the hitherto high quality of formal instruction at all levels of endeavor. For even as massive infusion of liquid cash, largely from the country?s new-found petroleum reserves, has remarkably enriched the country as never before, the country continues to wallow in abject poverty because the new Trokosi leadership, and their Gonja figurehead collaborators and, of course, their smattering rear-guard of Fante-Confederacy backers, call them the new Mandarins of Ghana, have an agenda that is decidedly individualistic and self-centered that recklessly preys on the collective to filthily enrich the elite, even while sporting such repulsive populist slogans as ?social democracy.?
The preceding is eerily exemplified in two recent cases in which two quite well-known freshman Trokosi parliamentarians and former deputy cabinet members with contiguous constituencies each accused their personal assistants, or aides, of having stolen similar amounts of millions of Cedis, Ghana?s national monetary currency, from their private quarters. Significantly, if I recall accurately, this is not the very first time that such outrageous thievery of our national coffers has occurred.
In 1998, for instance, two leading Trokosi operatives of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC), then as now, one a lawyer and former University of Ghana lecturer and former Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, and Foreign Minister, and the author a retired University of Cape Coast language professor and fairly renowned author, reported the loss of at least $30,000 (Thirty-Thousand Dollars), a piece, of money severally stashed in their bedrooms, for publicly unexplained reasons, and accused their butlers, or houseboys, of having made away with their pelf. At the time of the report, there were widespread speculations to the effect that the allegedly missing loots may well have come as ?dividends? from the treasury of the central government.
And then early last year (2012), what became infamously dubbed as ?The Woyome Scandal? hit the headlines. It entailed the collaborative scamming of the Ghanaian taxpayer by highly placed members of the Mills-Mahama cabinet to the whopping tune of GH? 52 million. Rather than facilitate the prompt recovery of the Woyome loot, as he pontifically promised during his electioneering campaign, President Mahama instead chose to sneeringly justify the wanton and unconscionable fleecing of the Ghanaian taxpayer by deviously faulting his main political opponents, the key operatives of the New Patriotic Party.
But that the ?Trokosi Boys? are, indeed, ?In the Sunshine? pretty much underscores the recent attempt by the wet-eared Mr. Okudzeto-Ablakwa to shepherd the attempted railroading of Mr. Joe Ghartey, the New Patriotic Party?s Member of Parliament for Essikado-Ketan, in the Sekondi-Takoradi municipality, and former Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, from being named as Second-Deputy Speaker of the Fifth Parliament of the Fourth Republic of Ghana. And when the aforesaid attempt turned awry and abortive, the shameless Mr. Okudzeto-Ablakwa was able to manage a dry smile and even drool to the following effect: ?I am happy that all of this has put critics of the NDC to shame and has shown the NDC as more mature, [and] more democratic, [and] a party for the future and for all well-meaning Ghanaians.?
Rather Trokosifistic, to think that the New Patriotic Party, the party that truly reflects the democratic ideals of the founding fathers of modern and postcolonial Ghana, has only a marginal role to play in the very house it uniquely designed and constructed.
*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
Jan. 8, 2013
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