I have always found Brigadier-General Joseph Nunoo-Mensah (Ret) to be peevishly funny, if also because the Winneba native, from the Central Region, has always come off to me as an old man who is so scandalously out of touch with the practical reality on the ground not to recognize the stark fact that he lost his relevance in Ghanaian political and public life and culture well over two decades ago.
And this was primarily because even as a senior military officer, the former Chief of the Defense Staff (CDS) of the Ghana Armed Forces (GAF) so woefully lacked a moral and a courageous sense of professionalism that he fecklessly opted to do the bidding of a civically transgressive scofflaw like Flight-Lieutenant Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings-led junta of the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), rather than honorably resign and jealously defend and protect his integrity, almost like those 18th-century French military officers who allowed themselves to be literally led by the nose by Lieutenant Napoleon Bonaparte, whose politically unorthodox “revolutionary” adventure ironically and farcically culminated in the artless dynastic replication of the very monarchical dynasty from whose stranglehold he had sought to salutarily liberate his countrymen and women.
This is the kind of feckless professional military personnel that I have dubbed as “Toy Soldiers,” the most typical and strikingly embarrassing example of which was the late Lieutenant-General Arnold Quainoo, the Ghana Army Chief of Staff who royally and epically bungled the ECOMOG Peacekeeping Mission in Liberia that culminated in the brutal and the barbaric execution of Master-Sergeant Samuel Doe during the Liberian Civil war. Yours Truly has absolutely no respect for this sorry-assed breed of Ghanaian soldier; and any soldier of the latter breed and kind, to be precise.
Brigadier-General Nunoo-Mensah would eventually regain the full use of his senses or cranial cream-puff, but only after his own recently retired Army Major uncle or blood relative by the name of Mr. Samuel “Sam” Acquah had been savagely abducted and brutally executed by Chairman Rawlings and his cousin, the President Nkrumah-cashiered Captain (Ret) Kojo Tsikata, and literally slip himself into a self-imposed internal exile and into virtual oblivion for quite a considerable while, perhaps with trepidation, as was quite common those days.
And then like the congenital coward that he was then and, apparently, still is, shamelessly cross ideological lines and carpets, with both hands tucked into the cavity of his crotch, to truck with the man who had executed and criminally cremated the remains of Major Sam Acquah, partially and inadvertently, after having been seismically trounced in the polls on the ticket of a strategically self-destructive New Patriotic Party (NPP).
In short, this is a wishy-washy unctuous political buffoon completely bereft of any remarkable modicum of both personal and professional integrity who has absolutely no right to be lecturing the rest of us, in particular Ghanaian youths, about how “nasty” the political climate and culture of the global community have become. You see, the fact of the matter is that unless he has been dead-drunk and asleep with both eyes closed over the past 90 years, the man who was born in either 1937 or 1938 cannot smugly tell his countrymen and women about having been born and grown up at a time when the world was far more pleasant and socioeconomically, culturally and politically comfortable than it is presently.
It also goes without saying that over the past half century, during most of which period it has been the Rawlings-led juntas of the erstwhile Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) and the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), as well as the faux-civilianized institutional establishment of the Rawlings-founded National Democratic Congress (NDC). that have literally held us, bona fide Ghanaian citizens, by the throttle – at least the overwhelming majority of us – who have experienced more hardships and leadership “nastiness” and naked repression and criminal immiseration than at anytime through most of the Twentieth Century and the First Quarter of the Twenty-First Century, including the latter two decades of British Colonial Imperialism.
Any man or woman or anybody, for that matter, born in the last two or three years of the 1930s cannot deny the apocalyptic and the catastrophic turbulence of much of the 1940s and well into the 1950s, when the Continental African Liberation Struggle also began to register some remarkable results, in critical consonance with the African Diaspora Struggle for human and civil rights. These were absolutely no “pleasant” years or decades the way that a morbidly self-absorbed Brigadier-General Nunoo-Mensah would have the rest of us believe (See “ ‘The World I Came to Meet Was Not Nasty Like This, I Want to Die Now’ – 86-Year-Old Former Security Advisor Cries” Modernghana.com 12/24/25).
It is quite obvious that this dotard is having a very difficult time coming to grips and terms with his mortality and ascent or descent into what former US President Barack Hussein Obama prefers to characterize as “The Ages.” But this funk of inevitable wistfulness and apparent manic depression is no license for this old fogey to cavalierly and pontifically presume that he has any right to even metaphorically muddy the waters for the rest of us who, by the way, are not significantly farther away from the constant and the perennially insistent reminder of our universal and natural mortality. For even as Yours Truly’s maternal grandfather, The Rev. Theodore Henry (TH) Yawbe Sintim-Aboagye (1896-1982) was fond of saying at about the same age that Brigadier-General Nunoo-Mensah presently finds himself: “Neither Fresh Leaves Nor Dry Leaves Have a Monopoly Over Perennially or Eternally Hanging on to the Branches of Any Tree.”
Sooner than later, we all of us, to a person, are wont to fall along the trail of this life by lottery, as the globally and the temporally immortalized Good, Old Bard of Avon would have so mellifluously and resplendently cast the same. Now, I edge or wedge into the foregoing the dictum inherited from Grandpa Yawbe Sintim-Aboagye of Akyem-Asiakwa, Asante-Juaben and Asante-Mampong, among a couple of other places and geographical locations as well, because it was this “most locally extensively traveled” and professionally selfless and indefatigable clergyman of the Presbyterian Church of Ghana who also led the morally and the culturally and the intellectually edifying mission and initiative that culminated in the establishment of the Winneba Presbyterian Primary School, in 1945, the very first batch of whose pioneering class of students included – you guessed right, Dear Reader, Our Beloved Uncle Joseph Nunoo-Mansah. So much for historiographical mendacity.
By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
E-mail: [email protected]
