?Contrary to what ?Joe Speedo? would have his audience of fellow truckers among the membership of the National Democratic Congress believe, it is rather Mr. Ekwow Spio-Garbrah who needs to promptly seek psychological therapy for his oversized ego and pathological crisis of personality (See ?NPP Leadership Should See a Psychiatrist: They Are All Mad!!? Modernghana.com 1/8/13).
Those of us who are old enough to recall the epic fool that Mr. Spio-Garbrah made of himself as Ghana?s Ambassador to the United States, during the 1990s, can sympathize with the man?s desperate need to project his clinical lunacy on his political opponents, largely the leadership of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP). Maybe what those who so much care ought to be asking about the shameful ?diplomatic? past of Mr. Spio-Garbrah is why he was literally kicked out of the United States by the otherwise egregiously tolerant Democratic government of President William Jefferson Clinton.
Very likely, Mr. Spio-Garbrah would mumble some incoherent nonsensicalities about his radical heroism having pissed off the ?imperialistic Americans.? In reality, the man had been expelled for conducting himself grossly undiplomatically. Couple the preceding with the worldwide acclamation of Mr. Kofi Annan, or any of the other lesser known Ghanaian diplomatic lights who served before ?Joe Speedo? right here in the United States, and the veritable psychological basket case that is the former Rawlings Education Minister could not be more embarrassingly poignant.
I also don?t know why Mr. Spio-Garbrah is so desperately attempting to parry off the glaring fact of him being an epic political failure among the ranks of the key operatives of the so-called National Democratic Congress. I mean, this is a man who many times attempted to scuttle the presidential ambitions of his own clansman, the late Dr. John Evans Atta-Mills, by luridly colluding with the Rawlingses to character assassinate the former tax-law professor of the University of Ghana. And when this tacky tactic did not seem to be working, Mr. Spio-Garbrah turned his unwanted attention onto the cabinet appointees of the Mills-Mahama government, in a shameless bid to being rewarded with a political sinecure.
He would characterize the entire Atta-Mills cabinet as being horridly composed of Team B and C players, almost as if to impishly suggest to the Ghanaian public that he was the best brain that ever sported a T-shirt emblazoned with the NDC insignia. But what even amused me more than anything else was when in the wake of the poison-assassination of President Atta-Mills in July 2012, the party met in the Asante regional capital of Kumasi to select a replacement. ?Joe Speedo? had frantically parachuted in from London, where he held the largely patronage post of Director-General of some neocolonialist institution called the Commonwealth Telecommunications Organization, hoping to have the now-President John Dramani Mahama, who formidably stood between Mr. Spio-Garbrah and Mr. Kofi Antubam?s praetor?s chair of the presidency of the Democratic Republic of Ghana shunted aside. Predictably, ?Joe Speedo? would be deafeningly ignored.
But that he clearly appears not to have recognized the sobering fact of him being a Team-D player where the presidency is concerned is, needless to say, what makes Mr. Spio-Garbrah the prime grist for a comprehensive Freudian psychoanalysis that the victim is rather too comatose to appreciate. Yes, Mr. Spio-Garbrah is the veritable victim of a brutally contused oversized ego, and has been comatose since he was roundly and flatly rejected in Kumasi as either the New NDC King or Kingmaker, in the wake of the heavily suspicious passing of President John Evans Atta-Mills.
That Mr. Spio-Garbrah had the chutzpah to even attend the funeral of my good, old Uncle Tarkwa-Atta is all the more to be pitied. His dastardly attempt to vicariously hide behind the forensically fraudulent and clinically blighted victory of the Mahama-led National Democratic Congress by thumbing his nose at the Akufo-Addo-led New Patriotic Party will not work. In fact, it is not working precisely because Mr. Spio-Garbrah continues to be in abject denial about the patent fact of him not being any longer a force to reckon with among the executive membership of the National Democratic Congress. He is not politically relevant because he adamantly and fatuously refuses to accept the obvious, however hurtful this may be, that he is simply not a prime presidential material but just an ordinary John Doe who was simply lucky to have been briefly invited to have supper with the Satanic demigods of the Sogakope Mafia.
By now, it ought to have become obvious to the luridly narcissistic ?Joe Speedo? that the Fante Confederacy-backed Gonja Mafia has absolutely no use for him and/or his jaded services whatsoever.
*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
Jan. 12, 2013
